My first ever ML/AI related post

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Around 2014-2015, the hype around ML/AI was growing quite big so I had to see for myself what it was all about.

MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) had also gained quite the popularity by then. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone by taking arguably the most famous course on Coursera, the Machine Learning course taught by Stanford Prof Andrew Ng. (He's to AI what Carl Sagan was for astronomy IMO)

I finished the course successfully but didn't really pursue the matter any further, education wise or dev wise. The course, however, definitely did help maintain an interest in ML/AI related technologies. I kept myself updated with the latest happenings in that sphere mostly bu subscribing to the subreddit r/machinelearning (which is quite good btw, with interesting AMA {Ask me anything} sessions from the foremost experts on AI).

Enter the Deep Learning course, taught by, you guessed it. Andrew Ng. Now I was very interested in taking it when it released (around 2017 I think) but I couldn't due to lack of free time. Luckily, waiting worked out for me because the course matured and they now had a good collection of 5 courses. I had a bit more free time in 2018 so I decided to take the plunge and enroll in the course and pay for it.

Now the course is meant to be finished in 3-4 months but I decided to cheap out and utilize  any free time I had, so that I could finish it as fast as I could. It was intense but I finished it in a month's time.

My brief review is that it definitely is a great course, since it exposes you to some of the latest developments in AI as used in industry/academia. Andrew Ng teaches the course in his inimitable style, first by building a foundation and then slowly taking it from there. The courses also start off by making you do programming assignments with numpy and making you implement the low-level math first and then it gradually introduces you to Tensorflow and Keras (higher level abstractions). This is a great approach IMO.

And with that, I think it's time to start doing some projects and document the process, lessons learnt, tips and tricks etc.

Wish me luck :)



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