Coursera, the world’s largest online education platform, recently announced a Specialization on deep learning, one of the hottest emerging fields in artificial intelligence.Created by Coursera’s co-founder and leading AI expert Andrew Ng, this certificate program will enable anyone with basic programming skills to explore the frontiers of AI.This is an extension to Andrew’slandmark “Machine Learning” course which introduced nearly 2 million learners around the world to cutting-edge topics in data science, computer science, and AI.

Through five interconnected courses, learners will be able develop a profound knowledge of the key AI algorithms, mastering deep learning from its foundations (neural networks) to its industry applications like Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, etc. The Specialization not only will prepare learners to tackle the rise of deep learning but provide them with the opportunity to contribute to the development of cutting-edge AI technology. Many courses also include interviews and guest appearances from leading industry experts and top leaders in the field who will share their personal stories and give advice for aspiring AI engineers.

According to Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Coursera and Former Chief Scientist at Baidu,“AI is the new electricity. Just as electricity transformed every major industry starting about 100 years ago, AI is now poised to do the same. Several large technology companies across the globe have already built divisions dedicated to AI, and have made huge strides transforming themselves with AI. Even in India, in the next few years, companies of all sizes and across all industries will realize that they too can - and must - be part of this AI-powered future. I’m hopeful that these courses will help many people to master deep learning, develop amazing careers, and build wonderful machine learnings systems that will improve the lives of numerous people."

The specialization is appropriate for anyone with basic Python skills, a strong mathematics background, and some introductory-level machine learning experience. The topics covered will be relevant for aspiring as well as practicing data scientists, machine learning engineers, data engineers, software developers, and learners coming from quantitative fields such as finance, engineering, and healthcare.

At the end of the specialization, learners will practice applying deep learning on applications in healthcare, visual object recognition, music generation, and language understanding, among others.