Free Online Course on Technology Entrepreneurship from Stanford University

Chuck Eesley (Professor in Stanford University's Management Science & Engineering group) will be taking a course on Technology Entrepreneurship in January 2012.

The class will mix in-depth case studies and research on the entrepreneurial process. How do you create a successful start-up? What is entrepreneurial leadership in a large firm? What are the differences between an idea and true opportunity? How does an entrepreneur form a team and gather the resources necessary to create a great enterprise? This and many more are areas that will be covered by Professor Chuck Eesley.

Register for the course here.

Free Online Course on Lean Startup by Steve Blank

I guess you know who Steve Blank is? In case you don't, Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or early employee at 8 startups, including 4 resulting in successful IPOs. The San Jose mercury news called him one of the 10 influencers in Silicon Valley.

In this course, you'll learn how to turn a great idea into a great company.

We now know that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. Large companies execute known business models. They use big company tools - business plans, income statements, revenue models, etc. to help organized their execution. In contrast startups search for a business model. And all the big company tools are irrelevant in the early days of a startup. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It's not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library. The end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works.

You'll learn how to use a business model canvas to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. Finally, you'll see how agile development can help you rapidly iterate your product to build something customers will use and buy. Each week will be a new adventure as you test each part of your business model.

The course starts in February 2012.

Register for the Lean Startup Online course by Steve Blank here

Free Online Course on Probabilistic Graphical Models from Stanford University

Professor Daphne Koller of Stanford University (Rajeev Motwani Professor in the School of Engineering), will be instructing a free online course in Probabilistic Graphical Models.

In this class, you will learn the basics of the PGM representation and how to construct them, using both human knowledge and machine learning techniques; you will also learn algorithms for using a PGM to reach conclusions about the world from limited and noisy evidence, and for making good decisions under uncertainty. The class covers both the theoretical underpinnings of the PGM framework and practical skills needed to apply these techniques to new problems.

Topics include:
(i) The Bayesian network and Markov network representation, including extensions for reasoning over domains that change over time and over domains with a variable number of entities;
(ii) reasoning and inference methods, including exact inference (variable elimination, clique trees) and approximate inference (belief propagation message passing, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods);
(iii) learning methods for both parameters and structure in a PGM;
(iv) using a PGM for decision making under uncertainty. The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you'll also learn how to apply PGM methods to computer vision, text understanding, medical decision making, speech recognition, and many other areas.

You can register for the course here.