coursera

Completed Generative AI with LLMs Course on Coursera

- lmn

It’s been quite a while since I did a course (as I regularly used to) to top-up my knowledge on the rapidly evolving field of AI. As a new parent, I guess it can sometimes get tough to make time for doing such courses, and regularly posting updates on a blog.

Since April 2023, I’ve been working on Muse at Unity. Muse is an LLM-driven AI assistant for Unity developers and enthusiasts that began as a web-based chat interface back then and has over time gotten closer and closer to Unity Editor to the point that now it’s able to take stock of what a user is actively working on in the Editor and provide tailored advice, code and even perform tasks within the Editor on their behalf.

I’ve been a part of this project pretty much since its inception, and have learned a lot simply by doing. There was little time to actually learn about LLMs more systematically given how hectic things have been at work (and outside work too), and I noticed quite a few gaps in my understanding of the wider LLM-space. So, I finally took the time to do a Coursera foundation course on LLMs which gave me the opportunity to fill some of these gaps. I really enjoyed doing this particular course, and I feel it was very well designed and executed by Andrew Ng and his team of instructors! And I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in getting a general idea of the space, key concepts and some basic hands-on experience in prompt engineering and model fine-tuning. As always, I chose to do it with the option of getting a certificate of completion.

Of course, this was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to LLMs! I’m looking forward to now placing anything new I come across into a more structured understanding of the LLM space that this course has given me!

Completed Practical Reinforcement Learning on Coursera

- lmn

It didn’t surprise me a few weeks into starting work at Unity that Reinforcement Learning would be a useful thing to know at least a little about. So I started studying the fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning from what seemed to be the most recommended reference on the subject – Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction by Sutton & Barto. I must acknowledge that this is a fantastic read and so thoroughly explained. It did take me several revisions of certain topics to read what is implied between the lines, which happens to be quite a lot of useful insights and information, but overall this textbook covers RL theory very very well!

After having spent a few weeks going through the chapters on the Dynamic Programming, Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo and Temporal Difference methods, I felt that I could use some hands-on practice to take the message home and, as always, I looked up Coursera to find the course Practical Reinforcement Learning. It took me more than a month (nearly two) to get through this course. This was partly because I was making sure to review the same material covered in the course in the reference textbook as well, which was very useful. And partly because the course material itself didn’t feel very up to the mark. I felt that in wanting to cover a vast amount of topics in the span of a single course, things got quite rushed. And the assignments were also not very well explained, and offered very little feedback in terms of what was wrong, which made it incredibly frustrating to get through them. To be honest, about half-way into the course I was no longer enjoying it, and was eager to just be done with it ASAP. And that’s exactly what happened. I can’t say I’m very thorough with any of the material covered in weeks 5 and 6, which I would definitely like to revisit in the future.

That being said, Reinforcement Learning is actually one of the most interesting topics in Computer Science / Machine Learning that I have done and I really do hope I have the opportunity to do something interesting using it in the future. And, of course, here’s the certificate that I completed the Coursera course (phew!).

Completed Programming Languages (Part B) on Coursera

- lmn

Earlier at the start of this month, I began the second Programming Languages course (Part B), offered by Prof. Dan Grossman of the University of Washington. I had done the first course a few months ago and found it very beneficial when it came to my understanding of some functional programming concepts and idioms, the notion of elegance in programming and good programming practices in general. It also really helped me formalise much of what I had come across in relation to Functional Programming, and approach the adoption of this style of programming more systematically in my own day-to-day programming projects. After nearly two months of having done that very interesting and challenging course, and having felt that a good bit of it had sunk in I decided to take on this second one.

The goals of this course were three-fold:

  1. To allow one to apply some of what was taught in the first course in the context of Standard ML (SML) to a new programming language, namely Racket.
  2. To introduce features of Dynamically Typed programming languages through Racket, and compare these in contrast with those of Statically Typed programming languages, such as SML.
  3. To understand the inner workings of a language interpreter by implementing one for a very simple hypothetical programming language in Racket.

I won’t be going into much details about the learnings of this course yet. I plan to do so in a couple of months when I’ll be done with the third and final course in this module and I will have had the chance to re-visit the contents of the first two courses to gain a better overall perspective.

In the meantime, here’s the certificate I was awarded for completing it.

Completed Programming Languages (Part A) on Coursera

- lmn

Having been curious about Functional Programming for a while now, and tried incorporating features of the paradigm into my own work with Python, I decided to give the first (Part A) of the three-part Programming Languages course module on Coursera. The module is meant to systematically introduce one to various theoretical concepts of programming languages, while having a special focus on Functional Programming. This first course (Part A), which I recently completed with a score of 98%, illustrated said concepts with the help of Standard ML – a Functional-style language.

It was excellently designed course, and also quite challenging. Apart from spending time on introducing the very basics of SML early on, it covered some very interesting concepts such as Pattern Matching, Function Closures, Partials, Currying and Mutual Recurstion. The programming assignments really made sure you understood what was covered in the course material, and the course-handouts were thorough and clear. There was also a strong focus on the matter of programming style, with the instructor commenting on what he considered good/poor programming style while covering the various concepts. We were marked on the style of our submissions too.

Completed Recommender Systems Specialisation on Coursera

- lmn

Now that I’m no longer working at Jukedeck, I happen to have plenty of free time on my hands! I’ve been spending this time travelling, catching up on my reading list, helping out with activities of the Music Tech Community – India and making music among other things. In an effort to satisfy a long-standing curiosity, I signed up for the Recommender Systems specialisation being offered on Coursera by University of Minnesota, and recently completed it. It comprised of four courses:

  1. Introduction to Recommender Systems: Non-personalised and Content-based (certificate)
  2. Nearest Neighbour Collaborative Filtering (certificate)
  3. Recommender Systems: Evaluation and Metrics (certificate)
  4. Matrix Factorisation and Advanced Techniques (certificate)

It took me about a month to complete all four courses at a fairly liesurely pace given how much time I had at my disposal while not working. This was a very well-taught specialisation with some of the best-designed Courses I’ve done on Coursera so far. It covered a wide range of topics that offered a comprehensive overview of a vast area of research. Solving the assignments by hand was a new, but very engaging experience that really allowed me to focus on what actually happens at a very basic level under-the-hood in such systems. It was all done by implementing the various formulae for content-based filtering, item-item collaborative filtering, user-user collaborative filtering (including matrix factorisation methods) in spreadsheets. There was an Honours Track in each course that focused on implementing the various types of recommender systems and related concepts that I decided not to pursue, as all the programming was in Java. I decided I would follow the courses up with my own implementation projects in Python as that’s something of greater interest to me. So now I’m looking for little projects to get me going.

I would definitely recommend this specialisation to anyone interested in Recommender Systems. It has left me with a very good understanding of the basics and a fair idea of the various directions in which I can pursue things in more detail. Not to mention, a tonne of references to read up on which I look forward to doing along with implementing some of the algorithms in the coming weeks.

Completed the Course “Machine Learning with Big Data” offered by UCSD on Coursera

- lmn

I successfully completed this course with a 98.9% mark. This course was relatively more focused than the others so far. The machine learning theory that was covered in it was very basic and good for beginners so I skimmed through it fairly quickly. Nevertheless, it was a good refresher of models such as Naive Bayes, Decision Trees and k-Means Clustering. What I found particularly useful was the introduction to the KNIME and Spark ML frameworks and the exercises where one had to apply these ML models to some example datasets.

I think this course and the last one were more hands-on and what I was looking for when I first started this module with a greater focus on ML in the context of Big Data.

And here’s the certificate that I was awarded on completing the course.

Completed the Course “Big Data Integration and Processing” offered by UCSD on Coursera

- lmn

I successfully completed this course with a 97.7% mark. This course was once again broad and touched upon some big data technologies through a series of lectures, assignments and hands-on exercises. The focus was mainly on querying JSON data using MongoDB, analysing data using Pandas, and programming in Spark (Spark SQL, Spark Streaming, Spark MLLIB and Spark GraphX). All these were things I was curious about and it was great that they introduced these in the course. There were also an exercise on analysing tweets using both MongoDB and Spark. They had one section on something called Splunk which I thought was a waste of time but I guess they have to keep their sponsors happy.

This specialisation so far (I’m halfway through) has been fairly introductory and lacking depth. It’s been good to the extent that I feel like I’m aware of all these different technologies and would be able to know where to start if I was to use them for some specific application. As I expected, this course was more hands-on which was great!

And here’s the certificate that I was awarded on completing the course.

Completed Andrew Ng’s “Convolutional Neural Networks” course on Coursera

- lmn

I successfully completed this course with a 100.0% mark. Unlike the other two courses I had done as a part of this Deep Learning specialisation, there was much to learn for me in this one. I had only skimmed over a couple of papers on conv. nets in the past and hadn’t really implemented any aspects of this class of models except helping out colleagues in fixing bugs in their code. So I was stoked to do this course. And I was not disappointed. Andrew Ng designs and delivers his lectures very well and this course was no exception. The programming assignments and quizzes were engaging and moderately challenging. The idea of 1D, 2D and 3D convolutions was explained clearly and in sufficient depth in the lectures. They also covered some state-of-the-art convolutional architectures such as VGG Net, Inception Net, Network-in-Network and also applications such as Object and Face Recognition and Neural Style Transfer net, to all of which convolutional networks are a cornerstone. The reading list for the course was also very useful and interesting. All in all, a great resource in my opinion for someone interested in this topic! And as usual, here’s the certificate I received on completing this course.

Completed the Course “Big Data Modeling and Management Systems” offered by UCSD on Coursera

- lmn

I successfully completed this course with a 100.0% mark. It was quite broad and covered a range of topics somewhat superficially, from Relational Databases, their relation to Big Data Management Systems, the various alternatives that exist for processing different types of big data. As with the first course, there were a lot of new names to grasp and connections to be made between the things they represented. The assignments were straightforward and involved running a few specific command-line tools and spreadsheet commands to process data and carry out some basic analysis just to get a feel for data tables and how one might go about extracting information from them. The final assignment involved completing an incomplete relational database design for a game. In my opinion, its goals could have been more precise, its connection to the course material more clear, and being a peer-graded assignment the evaluation criteria more well-defined. Quite a few learners seem to have lost out due to someone else not being able to evaluate their assignment properly due to the latter shortcoming. And as usual, here’s the certificate that I was awarded on completing the course.

It looks like the upcoming courses in this specialisation contain more practical and hands-on exercises, so looking forward to that in the coming weeks!

Completed the Course “Introduction to Big Data” offered by UCSD on Coursera

- lmn

I successfully completed this course with a 98.9% mark. It was easy and covered mostly definitions, some history of big data, big data jargon and very basic principles. There was an emphasis on what constitutes big data (in terms of size, variety, complexity, etc.), what kinds of analyses one can carries out on big data, what sources they can be from, and what tools one could use to analyse them. When it came to the latter, the course offered a brief introduction to the Hadoop  ecosystem that I found particularly interesting as I hadn’t ever worked with any of the software that is a part of this ecosystem. And there was also a simple assignment that gave one a taste of what working with Hadoop could be like. Here’s a link to the certificate I received from Coursera on completing this course.

Looking forward to the remaining courses in the Big Data specialisation!