Google getting serious about deep learning – Publishes free three month course

The course is free and will only take three months to complete, if you’re serious

Google is getting ready for deep learning and it wants you to be ready as well, which is why the tech giant has launched a three month course in order to help you learn its next level machine language.

Deep learning is a machine learning technique that has become the foundation of the several services that Google already provides (this would include everything from speech recognition to automatically sorting your photo collection). The course is available to see on educational site Udacity, and could actually take longer than three months, depending on how quick you are to learn it.

The course details state that if a student or any interested other person is able to invest 6 hours a week into the course, then they will be able to complete it in a period of months. This also means that if you spend more time on it, you will be able to complete the course in a faster period of time, which makes it really flexible for several students who are engineers, who do not have a lot of time on their hands (the scenario is also vice versa).

The course is definitely not for absolute beginners, but it aims to help established engineers and data scientists get on par with deep learning as well as TensorFlow. For those of you who do not know, TensorFlow is a machine learning software that Google had open sourced last November.

In a blog post published on Udacity, Google’s principal scientist Vincent Vanhoucke, who is also the course’s primary instructor, has said that the aim to make deep learning will become more accessible in this manner. He states the following:

“Reading the flurry of recent popular press around deep learning, you might rightfully wonder: isn’t deep learning just a ‘Big Data’ thing? Don’t I need the computing resources of Google or Facebook to take advantage of it? As someone from industry who accidentally fell into deep learning while working on Google Voice Search just five years ago, I’ve seen how nothing can be further from the truth. At that time, I didn’t use Google’s bazillion machines to get started with deep learning: I bought a modest computer with a GPU.”

So, if you happen to be an engineer who wants to indulge in deep learning, this is definitely the course to look into.