The idea of AI & ML has taken shape in the past few years and is now transforming how organizations exploit the large amount of data they generate. I am one of few in the inaugural class on AI & ML offered by Turnkey Learning, a course taught by Carnegie Mellon University which is home to the world’s #1 computer science school. I am privileged to be selected by Turnkey Learning to gain an advantage in this domain. 

One of the main reasons I joined Turnkey was because of their teaching philosophy, significant hands-on teaching approach, and their pedagogy. Let us be honest, several companies are providing courses in this domain. However, what I have seen is there is superficial teaching that happens. An environment that lets you thrive, learn, and engage with your mentors is new and gravely missing in today’s education landscape in India. At Turnkey this void has been filled.

The Turnkey Advantage

In the time I was with Turnkey, I spent the first few months, heavily involved in application development. You are given an abstract business idea and build on it. It is an exceedingly rare opportunity where you get to work on a software product from scratch. 

To achieve this, I was put through this activity of brainstorming, ideating, and continuously refining the requirements, designing the solution, and taking it from idea to prototype in a few months. I absolutely loved the entire experience. 

And then I moved on to learning AI & ML.

Learning from Dr. Naveena Yanamala

As for AI&ML, I was first trained by Dr. Naveena Yanamala, who introduced me to various machine learning algorithms and techniques. Some of the techniques we covered were regression, random forest, decision trees, SVM, KNN, boosting and bagging techniques. Working on a project in a team applying ML reinforced the concepts and advanced techniques. I used the knowledge to win a hackathon organized by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) recently. 

Learning from Dr. Bhiksha Raj

Coming to Dr. Bhiksha Raj’s course – An Introduction to Deep Learning, I initially found it to be difficult to keep up. The course was set up to promote collaboration between classmates. However, as time progressed, we discussed the complex topics and reached out to the Teaching Assistants to clarify conceptual and coding doubts that arose. There was a lot of work I had to put in as it was an advanced course, but now I am in love with the content he delivers. 

The unique feature that I like about this course is that the mathematics behind Deep Learning neural networks is explained and one part of each assignment is focused on the implementation of the math and logic. 

Deep Learning is a very advanced field in AI & ML. Someone who takes this course may not master Deep Learning post completion of the course, however they will be able to apply Deep Learning techniques to solve real-world scenarios, making this course a perfect one for those who are looking to upskill themselves in the AI & ML field.