Kickstart Your AI Journey with Elements of AI
Before diving into my Udacity adventure, let me spotlight Elements of AI. It’s a gem for AI beginners. Clear, simple, and powerful. Start there if you’re new or need a refresher.
My Udacity Experience: Top-Notch and Rewarding
I just wrapped up my third AI course with Udacity. As always, it was stellar. Meeting with my previous instructors made learning easier. Though I wish the course materials were refreshed as we work with them throughout the course. The same materials are our baseline for final project.
Recommendations to Myself From The Future
- Idea Generation: I’d brainstorm for my final project right from day one. Otherwise there is not enough time to collect feedback.
- Feedback Timing: Collecting five opinions took longer than expected. I’d set aside more time next time.
- Course Correction: My initial excitement got a reality check. My project needed tweaks, and I almost ran out of time to implement them.
Journey Through The Course
The Paradigm Shift
Here, you’ll master the art of storyboarding. It helps filter your ideas through a lens of practicality.
As I had learnt in my own project, some ideas may not be as feasible as initially thought.
At the end of each section, we can access summary and glossary to review key concepts.
Math Behind The Magic
Big data has five Vs: volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value. Understanding them is crucial step. This section equips you with essential tools, introduces us to the various branches of machine learning with the help of videos, pictures, key terms and quizzes. Having past technical experience in this field is helpful and I found it to be an asset during the submission project.
Architecture of AI systems
In this section, we explore the various capabilities of machine learning and the architecture of machine learning systems. We touch on subjects of natural language processing, voice recognition, computer vision, and incorporating business rules into ML solutions.
I have attached an extract from case study that is part of the training.
Working with data
This section is a refreshing break from the technical content as we go into data management and explore topics such as data labelling, cost of effort, and common pitfalls.
Accuracy, Bias and Ethics
This chapter is a must. It explores model accuracy and ethical dimensions. Guest speakers add layers of depth.
In addition terms such as accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score all comes here. I think this confusing subjects are very well explained.
Gathering feedback
This quite brief section is important part of our final project. Feedback isn’t just about gathering—it’s about presenting it well.
Thinking bigger
This section focuses us on how to gain buy-in for our ideas. Learn here how to sell your idea and create a roadmap. The insights are universally applicable.
Capstone Project
You’ll have everything you need to sell your AI idea to your imaginative CEO. But, be warned: I faced technical glitches that needed extra time before I could successfully pass the capstone project.
We will use materials introduced earlier that will assist us in preparing for a final presentation. Along with feedback logs, we will need to upload all materials to Udacity. I wish the materials were in different format than Microsoft Office.
I first exported them to Numbers/Keynotes but as I failed the project because one of the files was not readable, I decided to edit original Office files.
On average, I waited 6 hours for a review. The feedback I received was very insightful and helped me improve next iteration of the project.
Final presentation had 10 slides accompanied by draft powerpoint that is used together with an excel file as a sandbox to test all your ideas.
Final Take
Udacity’s AI courses are a game-changer. Intense but incredibly rewarding. If you’re serious about AI, this is your must take.
As for this post, I felt I need to consult it with ChatGPT. When I pasted my intro to the chat window, I’ve been prised by LLM for how much I achieved with the training. Well, I did and I want to share my journey with you 🙂
