Introduction

How is that possible?!

Machine learning can seem like magic. How can a computer recognize the objects in an image? How can a car drive itself?

Those feats are baffling, not just to the layman, but to many software developers. Even after several years of writing code, many developers are not well versed with machine learning.

To most developers, machine learning feels foreign. The field is teeming with math jargon, research conventions, and frankly, bad code. Instead of tutorials, people recommend consulting lectures and research papers. For many of us, machine learning is as intimidating as it is intriguing.

This course is an introduction for developers, written in their own language. After taking this course, you’ll be comfortable with the fundamentals and will be able to write machine learning programs. You probably would not be able to build your own self-driving car just yet, but at least you’ll know how machine learning works.

About this course

Machine learning is a broad field, and one course cannot cover it all. We’ll focus on the three facets of machine learning that are most important today:

1. Supervised learning
2. Neural networks
3. Deep learning

We’ll look into those terms as we go through the course, but here’s a picture and a few quick definitions to get started: