Udacity: Deep Learning Review

Udacity's "Deep Learning" is a 4-lesson data science course built by Google that covers artificial neural networks. The first lesson builds up some machine learning background on classification problems, while lesson 2 discusses the basic machinery of neural networks and deep learning (neural networks with multiple layers.). Lesson 3 covers conventional networks for image recognition and lesson 4 covers recurrent networks and issues dealing with text data. This course assumes you have intermediate Python programming experience and basic knowledge of machine learning, statistics, linear algebra and calculus.

Each lesson in the course consists of a series of short video lecture segments with occasional comprehension questions and breaks to apply topics discussed in programming assignments. The video quality itself is good and the lecture quality is adequate, but the lecture segments are very brief, with most lasting around a minute or less. The sum total of the video content in the third lesson on convents is less than 15 minutes. The programming assignments, which use a popular neural network library called TensorFlow, are lacking in instruction and involve either running large chunks of provided code or working on open-ended questions. You likely won't be able to make much progress on the assignments without prior knowledge of machine learning and TensorFlow or doing a lot of extra research outside of the course materials. The programming problems also require significant computing resources; my laptop with 8GB of RAM ran out of memory when running the provided code in the first assignment.

Deep Learning is a shallow course that is akin to reading cliffs notes instead of a textbook: you'll learn some terminology and be exposed to some interesting concepts but its abbreviated coverage is likely to confuse students who are new to neural networks while leaving more experienced students unsatisfied. This course seems like a rushed attempt to capitalize on the hottest buzzword in the hottest tech industry, which is a shame because it could have been a good course if it took the time to cover the topics in adequate detail.

I give Deep Learning 2 out of 5 stars: Disappointing.


*If you're interested in learning about the topics this course introduces in much more depth, check out the video lectures and course materials for CS231n, a deep learning course focused on image recognition offered by Stanford. The course is currently in session so materials are still being released and the content is up to date with the latest advances in the field.