Going deep into deep learning!

October 28, 2019

I was always fascinated by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. But for one reason or another, I never really got into it. I even took 3-4 courses related to AI in college, but the stuff taught in these courses was not practical. It was all boring and dull.

So, about three months ago, I was doing my search to find something to get started with practical learning of AI/ML. That’s when I met Amir and Ray on the internet. These guys are highly experienced in their fields and they are just amazing. They were organising a group in which they were planning to teach deep learning to willing students. So, I got on the ride.

The study material was based on Jeremy Howards’s FastAI Deep learning course. Although the content was not limited to the course the FastAI course served as a basic outline. The first part of the FastAI course is seven-week long. So, we started doing deep learning fast. AI/ML finally became fun. It was so amazing to see the results of training a simple image classifier. For the first time, I did something in AI where I was able to see the results. And this started a domino effect for me.

While I was doing this course, I also decided to brush up some of my Maths concepts. So, I binged a few playlists which I had saved a long time ago on youtube. After that, I went over the Into to Machine Learning course by Udacity, which helped in refreshing the basic concepts of ML. This was all going in parallel with the FastAI course. It was Week 4 in FastAI’s course and we were doing some NLP. Although NLP was covered in the deep learning course, it wasn’t as detailed as the vision problems. That was when I found out about FastAI’s NLP course and decided to take it. I went through all the videos of that course in a week. Although, I think I will probably need to go through the videos to make sure that I understand and remember everything. After completing the NLP course, I decided to find if I FastAI had some other courses and viola, I found their ML course. So, I decided to go through it as well. And as of now, I’m through 3/4 of the ML course and its midterm in FastAI deep learning. I’m also planning to take Rachel’s Linear Algebra course. After doing so much AI, ML and DL in the past few months, I can say that I’m deep into it. I feel like I’m ready to use AI to solve real-world problems. And I still want to learn more. I’m looking forward to the second part of FastAI Deep learning course. Apart from that, I’m also looking forward to solving real-world problems with ML.

And all this couldn’t have been possible with Amir, Jeremy, Rachel and Ray.

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