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Hi and welcome to the first level in this
training program about artificial intelligence and machine learning.
My name is Idan and I will be your teacher.
You probably know that for the last
couple of years, machine learning has become
a core important technology for many products.
Those ML algorithms are everywhere.
There are countless growing amounts of
practical application of machine learning already
applied in many places.
The big players in the market like Google,
Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and many others, are investing
a huge amount of funding on ongoing AI
research initiatives while trying to lead the market
with new practical use cases.
Many respectable high educational organizations have some
flavor of AI educational and research programs.
There are hundreds of new startup companies that
their core product or service is based on
AI as a market differentiator. Most of the
large enterprise companies, like for example, telecom operators,
are building dedicated AI teams to better utilize
their growing amount of collected data.
As part of the digital strategy of many large
organizations, AI is becoming a top priority direction.
Just check by yourself how many Data
Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, AI Researchers, Software
Engineers, Product Managers, Project Managers are needed
right now in this area.
The market demand for skilled people is going
rapidly, correlated of course, to the amount of
money being invested today by the industry.
I don't know if you heard about it before,
but some countries like China, US, Russia and others
already developed a dedicated strategy for AI.
Those countries identified AI as a
major technology in the upcoming future.
In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin said something
like that, "Artificial intelligence is the future, not
only for Russia but for all humankind.
It comes with colossal opportunities, but also
threats that are difficult to predict.
Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere
will become the ruler of the world."
Sounds a little bit scary, but I
just wanted to emphasize that unlike other
technologies, AI is perceived differently by the
business industry as well as by governments.
There will be a national level
race on AI between countries.
Which country will lead that technology 10-15
years from now, leveraging the economical and
maybe also the military potential of AI.
This introduction is just to let you know that AI is
coming big time and I think each one of us should
have some level of understanding about this important topic.
I would like to share with you some insights
I gained while diving into the subject of AI.
When I started my personal journey
while exploring this subject, I was quickly overwhelmed
by the amount of knowledge and skills that
are needed to understand some of the basic
fundamental things about AI and ML.
It is easy to get lost.
Many educational sources that are available on the
internet or while using books are quickly jumping
into complex math and statistical calculation that will
reduce the motivation to learn this subject.
And some people will probably say this is for
PhD graduate students, it's too complex to understand.
On the other side of the spectrum, some
of those educational sources are focusing on practical
implementations, meaning example, using some programming language like
Python or any other development framework.
My assumption is that a large portion of
students that are going to join this training
would like to understand the concept of AI
without really going into the practical side and
without trying to read some heavy statistical books.
Another challenge is the number of
buzwords we will hear about AI.
For me, it was a challenge to understand how things
are connected to each other, so I can better understand
the big picture and the relation between subtopics before diving
into a specific topic. As an outsider or beginner trying
to understand the evolving AI world,
it may look like magic tricks performed by
fast computer programmed by really smart people.
We enter some data into some machine learning black
box and somehow we can get amazing output
on the other side. What's going
inside that box is a mystery.
So my main objective in this level level one is to
make the AI subject more accessible, easier to digest it.
In this training, we are going to open that black box.
We will look inside and understand in high
level how this box was created, what are
the building blocks inside, what should be our
expectation while using such box, and more things.
That's it for now.
I think we are ready to start.