AWS logoWhen I was learning about artificial intelligence in school, knowledge was found in the form of advanced textbooks and academic journals. It takes a certain amount of dedication to understand and digest that information. Now, a few decades later, leading edge research can be found on the internet. But even better: many educational resources for people outside those academic fields of study are also available online.

These resources have just grown again, as Amazon opened up their AWS Machine Learning course to the world. Formerly a part of internal employee training, it now helps people get up to speed outside the company as well. (And naturally help convert them to become paying AWS customers.)

There are different courses for different audiences, from developers to business professionals. And they cover different parts of AWS services. When I get around to taking these classes (the to-do list never seems to grow shorter...) I'll likely dive into the developer track for visual recognition algorithms. If I feel good about my grasp of the code, I'll see if I can integrate an Amazon DeepLens unit into my robotics projects.

This set of AWS courses is the latest addition to a long list of web-accessible resources for learning latest tools for AI. It's great that I don't need to enroll in school to see how the field has evolved since the time I was at UCLA.