Are you ready for AI?

UCSC Extension Blog

7 years ago

“AI Frontiers is a great opportunity for our students.”

Artificial intelligence isn’t a new thing, but it’s certainly taken center stage as THE disruptive technology to change just about everything. Nowhere will that be more evident than at the AI Frontiers conference next weekend in San Jose where dozens of high profile speakers, hands-on trainings, and exhibitors will be showcasing the latest technology in its multiple applications.

UCSC Silicon Valley Extension, which teaches several AI-related courses, will be onsite hosting an information table to answer your questions about our deep learning, machine learning, and AI curriculum.

“We’ll also be there to meet the thought leaders in industry and tech development to better understand their workforce needs,” says Mayen Udoetuk, Ed.D., director of the UCSC Extension Engineering and Technology department. “UCSC Extension is in the perfect position to lead the education and training for AI in Silicon Valley. Through our course and curriculum offerings, as well as partnerships with industry experts, we’re providing the practical training that the tech industry expects.”

Udoetuk, who is a chemist and STEM educational psychologist by training, is spearheading the growth of the UCSC Extension AI program.

She points to the AI Frontiers conference growth, which, in just a year’s time expanded it’s industry-related AI applications from six to 11. This year’s topics include:

Video Understanding
Natural Language Processing
Robots
Drones
Deep Learning Breakthrough
AI in Healthcare
AI in Finance
Edge Computing
Games
Internet of Things
AI in Enterprise

Among the dozens of speakers are:

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and director of OpenAI and co-inventor of AlexNet, AlphaGo and Tensorflow
AI Jay Yagnik, vice president of Google and leader of Google’s machine perception program
Matt Feiszli, a Facebook research manager who leads Facebook’s video research
Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley professor and leading robotics researcher
Percy Liang, a Stanford professor, NLP expert, and creator of the SquAD competition
Mario Munich, a senior vice president of iRobot who leads the household robot company
Li Deng, chief AI officer of Citadel
Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinnovation Ventures and speech recognition pioneer

Hands-on training includes:

Image Understanding with TensorFlow (by Google team)
Sequence to Sequence Learning by Lukasz Kaiser of Google Brain
NLP for Beginners by Udacity team,
Weakly Supervised Natural Language Understanding by Ni Lao of Mosaix.ai,
Self-Driving Cars by LaiOffer team.

“AI Frontiers is a great opportunity for our students—who qualify for a 30 percent discounted registration*— and for Extension,” Udoetuk says, noting that Extension hopes to create an AI professional award, or mini skills series of courses, maybe as soon as next year. “We’ve already started that conversation with industry experts and are seriously brainstorming an AI certificate program. We’ll need top AI instructors and a visionary advisory board.”

Extension, which offers more than 30 certificate and professional credential programs, updates its offerings in response to market needs.

“Employers are telling us who they’re going to hire based on current and predicted tech trends,” she says. “To meet that need, UCSC Silicon Valley Extension is preparing highly skilled people.”