IIT Delhi's New, Free Online AI Course

The Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, are 23 premiere higher education universities, with around 16,000 students, as of 2020.

These are famous for their exclusivity, history, and quality of education, so it’s a big deal that one of them, IIT Delhi, is launching a free online AI course.

The Course

This is a 12-week course offered from 18th January 2021 to 09th April 2021. Those seeking a certificate take a proctored exam on 25th April 2021.

The deadline to enroll is 25th January 2021.

Here’s the 12-week schedule:

Introduction: Philosophy of AI, Definitions

Modeling a Problem as Search Problem, Uninformed Search

Heuristic Search, Domain Relaxations

Local Search, Genetic Algorithms

Adversarial Search

Constraint Satisfaction

Propositional Logic & Satisfiability

Uncertainty in AI, Bayesian Networks

Bayesian Networks Learning & Inference, Decision Theory

Markov Decision Processes

Reinforcement Learning

Introduction to Deep Learning & Deep R

You’ll be taught by Professor Mausam, an Associate Professor of the Computer Science department at IIT Delhi and an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Dr. Mausam received a PhD from the University of Washington and researches artificial intelligence topics like scaling probabilistic planning algorithms and large-scale information extraction over the Web.

The Certificate

Enrolling in the course is free, while certificate-seekers pay 1000 INR (around $13).

Completing the course does not guarantee that you’ll get a certificate. You need an average assignment score of at least 10/25 and an exam score of at least 30/75 to get the certificate, which will have your name, photograph, final exam score, and the logos of NPTEL and IIT Madras.

Is it worth it?

According to Statista, almost all U.S. companies rate IT certifications to be “somewhat valuable,” “valuable,” or “very valuable.”

Given that this certificate costs just a few dollars, and is given by a prestigious professor from a renowned university, it’s surely worth it.

That said, no certification out there guarantees career advancement, and the AI industry is more competitive than ever. To stand out, you’ll need more than a certificate.

AI project failure is extremely common in corporations, so they want to hire AI professionals that increase the odds of success. Naturally, this means they want to hire people with experience building, explaining, and deploying AI models.

With no-code AutoML tools like Obviously.AI, it’s never been easier to quickly build and deploy AI models.

Summary

This course is a great opportunity to learn cutting-edge AI topics for free, while those who wish to prove their attendance can opt-in for the certificate for a small fee.

In any case, you’ll want to prove your AI skills in an increasingly competitive job market by actually building and deploying AI models.