On Friday, I provided a two-hour introductory lecture on Deep Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning (specifically, Deep Q-Learning) to the Reinforcement Learning class at Columbia University for postgraduate electrical engineers. It was a pleasure to be able to speak to a room full of folks who were already abreast of the fundamentals of machine learning (e.g., cost functions, stochastic gradient descent) so that we could dive straight into the specifics of artificial neural networks. It was also fun to fill up all of the classroom’s overlapping, sliding chalkboards :)