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Amazon's free training: Internal machine-learning courses are now open to all

New free AWS machine-learning training offers everyone the same curriculum that its employees use.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer

Amazon has announced new, free courses in machine learning, offering all developers the same curriculum that it uses to train its own software engineers and data scientists.

The company has over 30 online machine-learning courses, including video, labs, and documentation that have been used within Amazon for the past 20 years.

Also: Top cloud providers 2018: How AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle, Alibaba stack up

The courses are split into four main tracks, catering to developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business types.

Developers, for example, are offered courses that teach machine-learning building blocks, how to build machine-learning applications, computer vision and natural language processing.

For business leaders, the courses promise to demystify artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, as well as help them understand the terminology and how to use AWS machine-learning services to build models and add intelligence to applications.

The courses are being offered as part of a new AWS Certification Machine Learning, which uses an exam format to test to and validate a person's knowledge about machine learning, such as which approach is optimal for a given business problem, and which AWS services to use for a machine-learning application.

After students complete the fundamentals, they're taken through real-world examples and labs, offering insights into how, for example, Amazon has tackled predicting gift-wrapping eligibility, optimizing delivery routes, or predicting entertainment award nominations using data from IMDb.

"Coursework helps consolidate best practices, and demonstrates how to get started on a range of AWS machine-learning services, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Comprehend," said Dr Matt Wood, AWS's general manager of artificial intelligence.

SEE: Deep learning: An insider's guide (free PDF)

The machine-learning exam is currently in beta and priced at $150, half the normal cost of $300.

Microsoft earlier this year also launched new artificial-intelligence courses through its Professional Program, which cover Python, math/statistics, ethics, data analysis, Azure Machine Learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition.

Students who complete the course gain a Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft UK also announced new AI courses last month, in part to address the challenge of private-sector firms cherry-picking the best academics from universities.

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