Data and AI are among the biggest buzzwords right now, and rightly so. For this writer, out of everything I’ve ever achieved in the world of IT, I’ve always found it’s giving people actionable insights to manage their business that has created the greatest transformation.
Data has always been important, of course, and making data-driven decisions. Yet making sense of data, making predictions, and mining it for value requires lots of data and lots of computing power. With today’s cloud resources, we’re all in a position where we can truly do amazing things with data - if only we knew how.
In fact, it's not only businesses that benefit; the more data literate we are as individuals the better prepared we are to critically and carefully interpret information presented to us in the news, by advertisers, from insurers, and in all manner of ways.
Big companies like SAS, Microsoft, AWS, and Oracle want you to be data literate and understand the tools and resources available. So, they provide free training to help you on this journey - making it a risk-free path where the only investment is your time. And for that price, why not get started now?
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SAS data literacy essentials
The global statistical and analytical software company, SAS, has been at the forefront of what we can achieve with data for nearly 50 years. It offers a free course of six 20-minute videos to give you a clear understanding of data literacy. This course is for everyone - no matter if you are a student, educator, or independent learner.
The course follows the journeys of a concerned parent, a small business owner and a public health expert who rely on data to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes you through their journeys to connect your skills to strategies for engaging with data in more meaningful ways.
It's a brilliant course that can benefit anybody and aids you in life as well as business.
Microsoft AI school
Whether you’re completely new to artificial intelligence (AI), or a seasoned professional looking to stay on top of your game, Microsoft’s AI School gives you the information, learning materials and resources you need to start building intelligence into your solutions.
The course is an open-source GitHub repository providing a 12-week, 24-lesson, curriculum on artificial intelligence.
It covers different approaches to Artificial Intelligence, including symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning, neural networks and deep learning - which are at the core of modern AI, neural architectures for working with images and text, and other AI approaches such as genetic algorithms.
The course will introduce you to two popular AI frameworks, TensorFlow and PyTorch.
If you're concerned this course starts off too technically, Microsoft offers some gentler introductions. You might like to try these other free courses:
AWS machine learning
AWS, like Microsoft, has no shortage of AI/ML resources for practitioners and also provides excellent training resources to explain concepts and get you started using popular open-source tools as well as AWS options.
And, out of all the artificial intelligence methodologies, none has shaped our recent world as much as machine learning (ML). Combined with the power of the cloud, ML allows us to train computer models to then make intelligent decisions by themselves on new data.
AWS offers its quickstarts on machine learning over Twitch - if you’re a gamer or enjoy watching streams, you’ll most likely already have a Twitch account. If you don’t, Twitch is free to sign up and provides access to a wide range of entertainment content as well as, of course, AWS training materials.
The AWS machine learning quickstart is a six-week series presented in an educational and fun way and steps into the shoes of a data scientist. You’ll use tools like Python and AWS Sagemaker to delve into exploratory data analysis, data preprocessing, and feature engineering to ensure your data is in the best shape possible for model training.
After watching, you’ll have the ability to build, train, and deploy a model, and justify why doing so is important.
AWS also offers an ML essentials course for business and technical decision-makers and this is a three-course curriculum that is a must-take for non-technical business leaders and other business decision-makers to prepare them for involvement in ML projects.
Oracle's getting started with computer vision
Back when I was at University in the 1990s computer vision was being approached as trying to recognise shapes via the different coloured pixels in an image. It was a difficult field, but today, computer vision has been made far simpler through machine learning. And, image classification training - teaching a model that a picture is a hotdog or a cat - is akin to the “Hello World” of computer vision.
Oracle's free training course explains how to train an image classifier by explaining the underlying principles as well as the open-source PyTorch library to help you implement it. This course shows how to train a model using a CPU only, then explains how you can leverage GPU resources to make the code more performant.
Image by @girlie_mac
