As announced last semester, we will commence with our lecture series on Statistical Learning Theory this week. A couple of quick points 1) We will meet this week as per the following schedule Date : Saturday, January 14, 2017 Time : 11:30 AM Venue: KD101 2) Please send a mail to Prof. Purushottam Kar if you wish to keep receiving updates and announcements for this series. We do not wish to spam users and will not send any more emails to the SIGML list. If you have already filled out the Google form last semester, you need not mail him again - He already have your email ID with him. 3) Since we will be severely limited in our number of contact hours, the goal of this lecture series would be to introduce major concepts in statistical learning theory: concentration inequalities, uniform convergence, algorithmic stability, calibration, and consistency. We would definitely like to cover some topics on-demand as well. 4) We plan to scribe notes for the series. Since this is not a creditable course, we will rely on volunteers for this task. In addition to that, we will have an active discussion forum to allow those following the series to interact. The timing chosen was most popular among those who responded on the Google form last semester. We are starting a bit late (by half an hour) this week to avoid clashes with ongoing faculty presentations. We might also shift to KD102 next week onward (it was occupied for ESC101 this week).