I have successfully completed the Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng from Stanford University on Coursera (certificate and course record verification link here ).
I highly recommend it! Andrew Ng (the brain behind Baidu’s, Google’s AI efforts and co-founder of Coursera) has put together a great course, with detailed explanations, useful examples and practical exercises.
After spending the last years working mostly with high level programming languages, it was refreshing to solve problems using Octave (open-source alternative to Matlab) and Math. As a next step, I’ll port the solution of the course exercises to Fsharp (I am a fan of Functional and Domain Driven Design) and/or Python.
I am also looking forward to apply the newly acquired knowledge to both personal & professional projects:
Professional
- as CTO of Flowster Solutions, I am also working on the company’s Artificial Intelligence strategy
- I have already identified a few use-cases in which it makes sense to integrate Machine Learning models into the Flowster Studio automation platform and actually offer value to our customers, partners (many products deceitfully misuse AI / ML buzzwords mainly for marketing exposure, without actually delivering value)
Personal
- add Machine Learning based face recognition (cloud 1st, edge 2nd) to my Home Monitoring with Raspberry Pi project
Machine Learning has a tremendous potential to empower both organizations and individuals:
- the integration of AI in the value chain of businesses marks the arrival of a new Digitalization Wave, taking the Digital Transformation of organizations to the next level
- the technology already has a very disruptive impact in many areas, sectors
- it has a very high potential in Automation and for sure it will reshape the job market in the (not so distant) future
Note: after a deep dive into the internals of Artificial Intelligence, I think that the general media depicts a very distorted image of the topic, over-hyping the technology and creating false representations of AI’s current capabilities.
Update – August 2017: Andrew Ng just launched a new project www.deeplearning.ai – a new specialization on Coursera for those who want to pursue a career in AI / Deep Learning