THE FUTURE IS HERE

How to Learn Deep Learning when you are not a CS PhD

This is a talk I gave at the SF Machine Learning Meetup on 4/11/17, hosted by AWS. https://www.meetup.com/SF-Bayarea-Machine-Learning/events/238740130/

Many people claim that deep learning needs to be a highly exclusive field, saying that you must spend years studying advanced math before you even begin to attempt it. Jeremy Howard and I believed that this was just not true, so we set out to see if we could teach deep learning to coders (with no math prerequisites) in 7 part-time weeks.

Our students are now using deep learning to identify chainsaw noise in endangered rain forests, create translation resources for Pakistani languages, reduce farmer suicides in India, diagnose breast cancer, and more. We wanted to help them get results fast, so we taught them in a code-centric, application-focused way. I’ll share what we learnt about how to learn deep learning effectively, so that you can set out on your own learning journey.