Not sure if people remember but Stanford in collaboration with Sebastian Thrun offered one of the first online educational course in Machine Learning. This piqued my interest in ML and I enrolled & completed the course from one of the most rural parts of India (I had to create an extension antenna for my 3g phone to get better reception).<p>Udacity was born due to the popularity of this course.<p>Can't thank Sebastian and Stanford enough for this free course.
Why not take the Georgia Tech online MSCS instead? Only $7k, you get a Master's degree instead of a 'Certificate', and you have the option of covering a lot of the same material.
Are ML/AI certificate holders competing for the same jobs as ML/AI PhD graduates? I have a list of follow up questions to this but it seems like there's a lot of hype for ML/AI/DeepLearning but no definitive way to track this new job market. These online programs, although more accessible, are doing the same thing as their physical campus counter part and not being transparent about what to expect after finishing their programs.
$20K for a few online courses? Genesereth teaching logic and automated reasoning? (I took a class from him once. Exam question: "Does a rock have intentions?")
This costs about $15k - $19k. With all the great lecture and homework content out on the Internet about AI, ML, deep learning, vision and natural language, I wonder if one can put together a more comprehensive and customized version of this that one can learn for free.
The toughest curriculum in any AI related MOOC I've seen so far. Just CS228 - Probabilistic Graphical Models is enough to bleed someone's brain. Wish Daphne Koller still taught that course.
Oh well, as someone who is currently enrolled into Udacity's Self-driving car and AI nanodegrees, watching ongoing MIT's self-driving course, considering taking GATech's online M.S. degree for ML, I should probably start planning budget for this Stanford offering...
20k or 10k per required course (there's electives but let's assume the bare minimum) seems steep for an online certificate which seems fairly worthless from a signaling POV.<p>I'm not sure their brand name justifies that price (not sure about the content). The competition is probably the AI nanodegree from Udacity which costs 800$/term with the chance to earn some of that back. If the employer I want the certificate for knows what online certificates are, chances are they are familiar with Udacity (possibly more so than with Stanford in that market).
If one's goal is to work at OpenAI, FAIR, or DeepMind, which would be a better use of time — obtaining this certificate or getting quality papers into NIPS / ICML?
Stanford is just trying to cash in on people by having their cake and eating it too.<p>They want to charge 20k, but not let anyone have a chance of further advancing to complete a real degree, no matter how excellent their performance in this program.<p>The reason they do this is solely to protect their brand and exclusivity. They already offer online degrees but the acceptance rate is just as limited as the on campus program.<p>Yes the learning is important, but so is the credential and a certificate doesn't even come close to a degree in the job market.<p>Stanford should pick one:<p>1) Charge Stanford prices, scale up online, and let any student who can do the work pay tuition and earn a degree.<p>2) Charge lower prices for certificates and continue to artificially ration real degrees.
> Software engineers interested in acquiring a solid foundation in artificial intelligence.<p>Does a "solid foundation in AI" actually exist?<p>I'm asking because it seems that nobody really knows why many algorithms actually work, or even how they should be adjusted to cover new applications. To me it sounds more like "educated guessing".
How do people in industry generally view these types of certificate programs? Is it markedly "worse" than doing e.g. a Master's on campus?<p>Also - is this closer to a Master's level program or part of an undergraduate curriculum?