The last few years have seen artificial intelligence (AI) as an ever-evolving and rapidly growing space. It has been vastly adopted across sectors and domains not just to study and analyse data or find hidden patterns but to also make meaningful real-life decisions.
The global AI market was worth $35.92 billion in 2020. And according to Fortune Business Insights, the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.6 per cent between 2020 and 2028, to reach a valuation of $360.36 billion in 2028. India itself is expected to invest $1 billion in the AI space by 2023. In fact, last year, the Indian Government allocated $477 million to the country’s AI ecosystem.
To make the most out of this opportunity, universities and educational organisations across the globe have been going big with investments to make the study of AI accessible to all. Indian colleges and universities have also been introducing new courses to keep up with the growing demand for AI and data science specialists.
Analytics India Magazine has curated a list of the 11 top free AI and data science courses launched in 2021.
Semiconductor company Intel has launched its Intel Unnati Program to equip India’s engineering students with the right data-centric skills. Additionally, Intel plans to set up 100 Intel Unnati Data-Centric Labs over the next year across engineering institutions and universities, laying focus on research and innovation. This programme will allow students to combine Intel FPGA hardware and software efficiently to accelerate workloads for processor-intensive tasks. At the end of the programme, they will be awarded an Intel co-branded certificate.
Microsoft has launched a 12-weeks MIT-approved ML course for beginners. The 26-lesson curriculum will teach students about classic machine learning using Scikit-learn. The course covers the following topics— introduction to ML, its history, fairness in ML, techniques for ML, introduction to regression, classification, clustering, NLP tasks, translation and sentiment analysis, time series forecasting, reinforcement learning, etc.
Amazon Web Service (AWS) re/Start is a classroom-based, full-time skills development and training programme designed to help aspiring individuals prepare for and connect with potential employers in the cloud space. Through this course, students will learn the AWS Cloud fundamentals and be able to build using Linux, Python, networking, security and relational database skills. The programme is presently held across cities– Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram.
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras’ 12-weeks course on AI is hosted on the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) platform and is delivered by Prof Deepak Kehmanu of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The course is free to audit, but one has to pay Rs 1,000 to take the test.
Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar and the Punjab Skill Development Mission have joined hands to offer a free course in AI and data science to the youngsters of Punjab. Open for students of 12th standard with a mathematical background; the programme will have two module-based programmes— L2 programme for four weeks; and L3 programme for twelve weeks. Students will receive a certificate from IIT Ropar post the completion of the course.
Post the completion of this coding programme, learners will be able to build trusted and user-centred AI products with the People + AI Research (PAIR) guidebook. Additionally, learners will get to learn about the latest additions of PAIR Guidebook’s second edition and go through a series of exercises, highlighting the opportunities in the AI development process to calibrate user trust, focusing on data and user-facing explainability. Additionally, they will get an introduction to a broader toolkit of materials and resources available.
This course on machine learning is offered by Harvard University as a part of a larger Professional Certificate Program in Data Science. The course focuses on data analysis and statistics and is aimed at helping students build a recommendation system for movies and learn the science behind a popular data science technique. Post the completion of this course; learners will know about the basics of ML, how to perform cross-validation to avoid overtraining, popular ML algorithms, regularisation and its usefulness. The estimated time taken to complete the course is eight weeks, provided students spend two to four hours every week.
This course on Data Science Specialisation is offered by the John Hopkins University and will help learners launch their career in data science. Takers of the course will learn to use R to clean, analyse and visualise data; navigate the data science pipeline– from data acquisition to publication; perform regression analysis and inference using regression models; and use GitHub to manage data science projects.
This beginner-level course takes approximately 11 months to complete and has ten modules under the specialisation. Instructors of the course are Jeff Leek- Associate Professor of Biostatistics, Roger D Peng– Associate Professor of Biostatistics, and Brian Caffo– Professor of Biostatistics.
The beginner-level Data Science Foundations programme by CognitiveClass.ai consists of three courses:
Offered by MIT, the Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science course includes– advanced programming in Python 3, Knapsack problem, graphs and graph optimisation, dynamic programming, plotting with the pylab package, probability, distributions and statistical fallacies. The course is tagged by John Guttag, Eric Grimson, and Ana Bell of MIT. The estimated time to complete this course is nine weeks, provided learners spend 14 to 16 hours per week.
The introductory course on Data Mining on KDNuggets is a one-semester introductory course on data mining for advanced and first-year graduate students. The course is created by Dr Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Prof Gary Parker. It covers topics including ML and data mining, ML and classification, regression, visualisation, summarization and targeted marketing, among others.
After diving deep into the Indian startup ecosystem, Debolina is now a Technology Journalist. When not writing, she is found reading or playing with paint brushes and palette knives. She can be reached at [email protected]
Copyright Analytics India Magazine Pvt Ltd
