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Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

scpd.stanford.edu

61–70 of 122 posts

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#61
post #23
post #4

Would anyone recommend this over doing a masters degree in the similar area of study but at a local university (ie. not Standford)?

Disclaimer: I do not hold any kind of real degree (just an Associates from a defunct tech school - worth little to nothing now) - so take the following for what it is... Based on my experience, which I won't re-iterate here - the various MOOCs I've taken (and currently the Udacity Nanodegree) would not be anywhere close to a masters in the subject (unless I am severely overestimating a masters - but I don't think so)…

Rigor is there.

I'm now working in the ML/AI research division of big-4, all I needed (and all hiring teams needed to see on my resume) were a couple of these classes (with good internal performance ratings).

Having said that, my employer paid for these classes. No way I would pay this price out of pocket. There are probably much cheaper ways to get the same knowledge.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#62
post #26

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.

Yep. And Sebastian Thrun's course (the Stanford professor, google VP, Udacity founder and google driverless car initiator) is part of that program. You can take AI for robotics for credit there :)

They require a previous undergraduate degree, which is a no go for me. I'm already a high level software engineer at a top tier company. I have no desire to go back and take an undergraduate degree. But I do like collecting certificates... Currently taking Udacity's self-driving nano-degree, pretty fun for someone with no robotics background.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And Sebastian Thrun's course (the Stanford professor, google VP, Udacity founder and google driverless car initiator) is part of that program. You can take AI for robotics for credit there :)

They require a previous undergraduate degree, which is a no go for me. I'm already a high level software engineer at a top tier company. I have no desire to go back and take an undergraduate degree. But I do like collecting certificates... Currently taking Udacity's self-driving nano-degree, pretty fun for someone with no robotics background.

How closely do they check the undergrad degree? Some second rate universities will trade you a degree for experience plus cash. Most of them are non-accredited though.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#64

Stanford is just trying to cash in on people by having their cake and eating it too. 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. 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 pr…

For me it's valuable the way they've constructed it. I like the idea that I can take some night classes in addition to my full time job, and just focus on one specific area. Okay, graduate degrees fulfill that purpose too, but with life events now and over the horizon, I just don't have the bandwidth to commit to getting my Masters or a Ph.D. right now. I really have no problem with this.

But why pay for it than?

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#67
post #37

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.

You are in luck. They have just re-released it on Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/probabilistic-graph...

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#68
post #37

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.

You are in luck. They have just re-released it on Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/specializations/probabilistic-graph...

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#69
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Thrun's AI course, Ng's ML course, and Widom's Databases course were announced and ran pretty much simultaneously. They were all successful, but only Thrun decided to split off because of it.

I noticed that Andrew's course is still available. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning Is it still a good introduction to machine learning? It's several years old now. Are there better courses available?

It's a good course.

The only(?) real criticism of it is the reliance on Matlab/Octave.

Re: Artificial Intelligence Graduate Certificate

#70
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.

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).

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