15. May, 2020

AI for Everyone, Andrew Ng

I first heard about the AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Everyone course by Andrew Ng, when I attended re:Mars by Amazon on June 12, 2019. I also got to listen to Andrew Ng’s talk at the conference. It was simple and easy to understand. Post his talk, he interacted with the conference attendees and got to see him at work up close. He was very curious and asked a lot of questions to the people who interacted with him. I was fortunate enough to talk to him as well. I also met an Intel Manager at the conference who mentioned that he asks all his new hires to take the AI for Everyone course.

During this quarantine period, I got to complete the course and I only wish I had completed it then and there. This course is for everyone. It was not technical and there were a lot of real-life examples. You get to learn the differences between data science and machine learning. The role of a data scientist is more clearer to me after completing this course. The data scientist analyzes the data and provides actionable insights. You can also start with a small amount of data and you do not need to have a large data set. Andrew also recommends starting small and have some easy wins to boost confidence. One more good learning which came out of a course is having an AI Team that could be used across multiple teams. The AI folks can be a shared resource across multiple teams. This way they get to harness all the data.

Though at DCKAP, we have been dabbling in AI, we will be focussing more on it. We are also setting up a small AI team within our company to automate tasks. We are excited and glad we got to take this course.