Introduction to the Course

Welcome to the course! Hugging Face is a popular deep learning model library. Even if we don't have much knowledge of convoluted concepts in modern artificial intelligence, Hugging Face enables us to leverage its power by inferring its models. Hugging Face describes itself as "on a journey to advance and democratize NLP for everyone."

What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. APIs help expose an application's capabilities to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to their data.

Consider the case of an application that performs natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) tasks on the provided input. Building and exposing an API for this application will enable others to programmatically perform NLP and CV operations, such as classification, text summarization, and image segmentation.

Prerequisites

This course assumes that readers have:

• A basic understanding of APIs.

• Fundamental knowledge of JavaScript and React.

• An understanding of basic machine learning (ML) and NLP concepts.

Intended audience

This course is useful for anyone who wants to use state-of-the-art ML models, especially NLP and CV models, for inference. It caters to a broad spectrum of users who are working as industry engineers, software developers, data scientists, and even ML researchers. They can use it to perform direct inference or as an input to some other ML pipeline.