AI Apprentice to AI Architect

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way businesses and governments are developing and using information. This course offers an overview of AI, its history, and its use in real-world situations; prior knowledge of machine learning, neural network, and probabilistic approaches is recommended. There are multiple definitions of AI, but the most common view is that it is software which enables a machine to think and act like a human, and to think and act rationally. Because AI differs from plain programing, the programming language used will depend on the application. In this series of videos, you will be introduced to multiple tools and techniques used in AI development. Also discussed are important issues in its application, such as the ethics and reliability of its use. You will set up a programing environment for developing AI applications and learn the best approaches to developing AI, as well as common mistakes. Gain the ability to communicate the value AI can bring to businesses today, along with multiple areas where AI is already being used.

This course covers simple and complex types of AI (artificial intelligence) available in today's market. In it, you will explore theories of mind research, self-aware AI, artificial narrow intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and artificial super intelligence. First, learn the ways in which AI is used today in agriculture, medicine, by the military, in financial services, and by governments. As a special field of computer science that uses mathematics, statistics, cognitive and behavioral sciences, AI uses unique applications to perform actions based on data it uses as an input, and does so by mimicking the activity within the human brain. No data can be 100 percent accurate, bringing a certain degree of uncertainty to any kind of AI application. So this course seeks to explain how and why AI needs to be developed for a particular use scenario, helping you understand the many aspects involved in AI programming and how AI performance needs to be good enough to complete a certain task.

In developing AI (artificial intelligence) applications, it is important to play close attention to human-computer interaction (HCI) and design each application for specific users. To make a machine intelligent, a developer uses multiple techniques from an AI toolbox; these tools are actually mathematical algorithms that can demonstrate intelligent behavior. The course examines the following categories of AI development: algorithms, machine learning, probabilistic modelling, neural networks, and reinforcement learning. There are two main types of AI tools available: statistical learning, in which large amount of data is used to make certain generalizations that can be applied to new data; and symbolic AI, in which an AI developer must create a model of the environment with which the AI agent interacts and set up the rules. Learn to identify potential AI users, the context of using the applications, and how to create user tasks and interface mock-ups.

Human computer interaction (HCI) design is the starting point for an artificial intelligence (AI) program. Overall HCI design is a creative problem-solving process oriented to the goal of satisfying largest number of customers. In this course, you will cover multiple methodologies used in the HCI design process and explore prototyping and useful techniques for software development and maintenance. First, learn how the anthropomorphic approach to HCI focuses on keeping the interaction with computers similar to human interactions. The cognitive approach pays attention to the capacities of a human brain. Next, learn to use the empirical approach to HCI to quantitatively evaluate interaction and interface designs, and predictive modeling is used to optimize the screen space and make interaction with the software more intuitive. You will examine how to continually improve HCI designs, develop personas, and use case studies and conduct usability tests. Last, you will examine how to improve the program design continually for AI applications; develop personas; use case studies; and conduct usability tests.

Python is one of the most popular programming languages and programming AI in this language has many advantages. In this course, you'll learn about the differences between Python and other programming languages used for AI, Python's role in the industry, and cases where using Python can be beneficial. You'll also examine multiple Python tools, libraries, and use environments and recognize the direction in which this language is developing.

In this course, you'll learn about development of AI with Python, starting with simple projects and ending with comprehensive systems. You'll examine various Python environments and ways to set them up and begin coding, leaving you with everything you need to begin building your own AI solutions in Python.

In this course, you'll explore basic Computer Vision concepts and its various applications. You'll examine traditional ways of approaching vision problems and how AI has evolved the field. Next, you'll look at the different kinds of problems AI can solve in vision. You'll explore various use cases in the fields of healthcare, banking, retail cybersecurity, agriculture, and manufacturing. Finally, you'll learn about different tools that are available in CV.

In this course, you'll explore Computer Vision use cases in fields like consumer electronics, aerospace, automotive, robotics, and space. You'll learn about basic AI algorithms that can help you solve vision problems and explore their categories. Finally, you'll apply hands-on development practices on two interesting use cases to predict lung cancer and deforestation.

To implement cognitive modeling inside AI systems, a developer needs to understand the major differences between commonly used cognitive models and their best qualities. Today cognitive models are actively utilized in healthcare, neuroscience, manufacturing and psychology and their importance compared to other AI approaches is expected to rise. Developing a firm understanding of cognitive modeling and its use cases is essential to anyone involved in creating AI systems. In this course, you'll identify unique features of cognitive models, which help create even more intelligent software systems. First you will learn about the different types of cognitive models and the disciplines involved in cognitive modeling. Further, you will discover main use cases for cognitive models in the modern world and learn about the history of cognitive modeling and how it is related to computer science and AI.

Practice plays an important role in AI development and helps one get familiarized with commonly used tools and frameworks. Knowing which methods to apply and when is critical to completing projects quickly and efficiently. Based on code examples provided, you will be able to quickly learn important cognitive modeling libraries and apply this knowledge to new projects in the field. In this course, you'll learn the essentials of working with cognitive models in a software system. First, you will get a detailed overview of each type of learning used in cognitive modeling. Further, you will learn about the toolset used for cognitive modeling with Python and recall which role cognitive models play in AI and business. Finally, you will go through various cognitive model implementations to develop skills necessary to implement cognitive modeling in real world.

Final Exam: AI Apprentice will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the AI Apprentice track of the Skillsoft Aspire AI Apprentice to AI Architect Journey.

Any aspiring AI developer has to clearly understand the responsibilities and expectations when entering the industry in this role. AI Developers can come from various backgrounds, but there are clear distinctions between this role and others like Software Engineer, ML Engineer, Data Scientist, or AI Engineers. Therefore, any AI Developer candidate has to posses the required knowledge and demonstrate proficiency in certain areas. In this course you will learn about the AI Developer role in the industry and compare the responsibilities of AI Developers with other engineers involved in AI development. After completing the course, you will recognize the mindset required to become a successful AI Developer and become aware of multiple paths for career progression and future opportunities

A working knowledge of multiple AI development frameworks is essential to AI developers. Depending on the particular focus, you may decide on a particular framework of your choice. However, various companies in the industry tend to use different frameworks in their products, so knowing the basics of each framework is quite helpful to the aspiring AI Developer. In this course you will explore popular AI frameworks and identify key features and use cases. You will identify main differences between AI frameworks and work with Microsoft CNTK and Amazon SageMaker to implement model flow.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is an open source framework for distributed deep learning suitable for commercial applications. It's primarily used to develop neural networks but can also be used for machine learning and cognitive computing. It supports multiple languages and can easily be used in the cloud. These factors make CNTK a good fit for various AI projects. In this course, you'll explore the basic concepts required to work with Microsoft CNTK. You'll compare other frameworks with CNTK, examine the process of creating machine learning and deep learning models with CNTK, and learn how it can be used with several cloud services. You'll move on to learn where to access CNTK documentation, community, and installation guidelines. Finally, you'll use CNTK to predict diabetes using retina scans.

Keras is a deep learning package suitable for beginners. Although it is applied in multiple standard deep learning use cases, it is also used by commercial-grade products. To facilitate this, Keras provides additional, flexible options on top of the well-known Sequential API, which allow you to customize and create various neural networks. To utilize this, however, requires a more in-depth knowledge of the Keras framework. In this course, you'll develop the core skills needed to work with the Keras framework. You'll explore the advantages and disadvantages of using Keras over other frameworks, and examine how Keras can be used with TensorFlow. You'll move on to recognize how Keras is used for machine learning and deep learning. Finally, you'll implement two deep learning projects using the Keras framework.

Apache Spark provides a robust framework for implementing machine learning and deep learning. It takes advantage of resilient distributed databases to provide a fault-tolerant platform well-suited to developing big data applications. Because many large companies are actively using this framework, AI developers should be familiar with the basics of implementing AI with Apache Spark and Spark ML. In this course, you'll explore the concept of distributed computing. You'll identify the benefits of using Spark for AI Development, examining the advantages and disadvantages of using Spark over other big data AI platforms. Next, you'll describe how to implement machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision using Spark. Finally, you'll use Spark ML to create a movie recommendation system commonly used by Netflix and YouTube.

Amazon offers AI developers a wide variety of tools and frameworks including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Amazon Machine Learning (ML) framework. By integrating complex machine and deep learning development with the extensive computing capabilities of Amazon, Amazon ML allows AI developers to adopt big data AI services. With many companies actively using AWS and Amazon ML, a basic knowledge of this framework is beneficial. In this course, you'll learn how to use Amazon ML together with AWS, to work with big data, and to create machine and deep learning models. You'll also examine the basics of automated model deployment with Amazon SageMaker. Next, you'll explore how to use Amazon ML for image and video analysis, text-to-speech translation, and text analytics. Finally, you'll implement a system to analyze movie review sentiment using the Amazon ML framework.

Cognitive modeling can provide additional human qualities to AI systems. It is traditionally used in cognitive machines and expert systems. However, with extra computing power, it can be applied to more profound AI approaches like neural networks and reinforcement learning systems. Knowledge of cognitive modeling applications is essential to any AI developer aspiring to design AI architectures and develop large-scale applications. In this course, you'll examine the role of cognitive modeling in AI development and its possible applications in NLP, image recognition, and neural networks. You'll outline core cognitive modeling concepts and significant industry use cases. You'll list open source cognitive modeling frameworks and explore cognitive machines, expert systems, and reinforcement learning in cognitive modeling. Finally, you'll use cognitive models to solve real-world problems.

Robots can utilize machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, as well as probabilistic techniques to achieve intelligent behavior. This application of AI to robotic systems is found in the automotive, healthcare, logistics, and military industries. With increasing computing power and sophistication in small robots, more industry use cases are likely to emerge, making AI development for robotics a useful AI developer skill. In this course, you'll explore the main concepts, frameworks, and approaches needed to work with robotics and apply AI to robots. You'll examine how AI and robotics are used across multiple industries. You'll learn how to work with commonly used algorithms and strategies to develop simple AI systems that improve the performance of robots. Finally, you'll learn how to control a robot in a simulated environment using deep Q-networks.

Adopting the foundational techniques of natural language processing (NLP), together with the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) technique developed by Google, allows developers to integrate NLP pipelines into their projects efficiently and without the need for large-scale data collection and processing. In this course, you'll explore the concepts and techniques that pave the foundation for working with Google BERT. You'll start by examining various aspects of NLP techniques useful in developing advanced NLP pipelines, namely, those related to supervised and unsupervised learning, language models, transfer learning, and transformer models. You'll then identify how BERT relates to NLP, its architecture and variants, and some real-world applications of this technique. Finally, you'll work with BERT and both Amazon review and Twitter datasets to develop sentiment predictors and create classifiers.

Final Exam: AI Developer will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the AI Developer track of the Skillsoft Aspire AI Apprentice to AI Architect Journey.

AI Practitioner is a cross-industry advanced AI Developer position that has a growing demand in the modern world. Candidates for this role need to demonstrate proficiency in optimizing and tuning AI solutions to deliver the best possible performance in the real world. AI Practitioners require more advanced knowledge of algorithm implementations and should have a firm knowledge of latest toolsets available. In this course, you'll be introduced to the AI Practitioner role in the industry. You'll examine an AI Practitioner's skillset and responsibilities in relation to AI Developers, Data Scientists, and ML and AI Engineers. Finally, you'll learn about the scope of work for AI Practitioners, including their career opportunities and pathways.

Optimization is required for any AI model to deliver reliable outcomes in most of the use cases. AI Practitioners use their knowledge of optimization techniques to choose and apply various solutions and improve accuracy of existing models. In this course, you'll learn about advanced optimization techniques for AI Development, including multiple optimization approaches like Gradient Descent, Momentum, Adam, AdaGrad and RMSprop optimization. You'll examine how to determine the preferred optimization technique to use and the overall benefits of optimization in AI. Lastly, you'll have a chance to practice implementing optimization techniques from scratch and applying them to real AI models.

Tuning hyper parameters when developing AI solutions is essential since the same models might behave quite differently with different parameters set. AI Practitioners recognize multiple hyper parameter tuning approaches and are able to quickly determine best set of hyper parameters for particular models using AI toolbox. In this course, you'll learn advanced techniques for hyper parameter tuning for AI development. You'll examine how to recognize the hyper parameters in ML and DL models. You'll learn about multiple hyper parameter tuning approaches and when to use each approach. Finally, you'll have a chance to tune hyper parameters for a real AI project using multiple techniques.

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit provides powerful machine learning and deep learning algorithms for developing AI. Knowing which problems are easier to solve using Microsoft CNTK over other frameworks helps AI practitioners decide on the best software stack for a given application. In this course, you'll explore advanced techniques for working with Microsoft CNTK and identify which cases benefit most from MS CNTK. You'll examine how to load and use external data using CNTK and how to use its imperative and declarative APIs. You'll recognize how to carry out common AI development tasks using CNTK, such as working with epochs and batch sizes, model serialization, model visualization, feedforward neural networks, and machine learning model evaluation. Finally, you'll implement a series of practical AI projects using Python and MS CNTK.

Keras provides a quick way to implement, train, and evaluate robust neural networks in Python. Using Keras for AI development for prototyping AI is standard practice and AI practitioners need to know why and how to use Keras for particular AI implementations. In this course, you'll explore advanced techniques for working with the Keras framework. You'll recognize how Keras is different from other AI frameworks and identify cases in which it is advantageous to use Keras. You'll examine the functionality of the Keras Sequential model and Functional API and the role of multiple deep learning layers present in Keras. Finally, you will work with practical AI projects developed using Keras and troubleshoot common problems related to model training and evaluation.

Spark is a leading open-source cluster-computing framework that is used for distributed databases and machine learning. Although not primarily designed for AI, Spark allows you to take advantage of data parallelism and the large distributed systems used in AI development. AI practitioners should recognize when to use Spark for a particular application. In this course, you'll explore advanced techniques for working with Apache Spark and identify the key advantages of using Spark over other platforms. You'll define the meaning of resilient distributed databases (RDDs) and explore several workflows related to them. You'll move on to recognize how to work with a Spark DataFrame, identifying its features and use cases. Finally, you'll learn how to create a machine learning pipeline using Spark ML Pipelines.

The Amazon Machine Learning framework allows you to quickly deploy machine learning models using Amazon Web Services, automate model deployment and maintenance, and configure other Amazon tools to work in synchronicity. AI practitioners should consider the benefits and best practices of working with Amazon ML and other Amazon services in their AI development projects. In this course, you'll explore advanced techniques for working with the Amazon ML framework. You'll examine the significant differences between Amazon ML and other frameworks. You'll recognize the advantages of using the Amazon ML platform for certain projects and identify the Amazon ML workflow. Finally, you'll complete a project developing and training an AI model using the Amazon ML framework, and troubleshoot typical problems that come up during model training and evaluation.

The world of technology continues to transform at a rapid pace, with intelligent technology incorporated at every stage of the business process. Intelligent information systems (IIS) reduce the need for routine human labor and allow companies to focus instead on hiring creative professionals. In this course, you'll explore the present and future roles of intelligent informational systems in AI development, recognizing the current demand for IIS specialists. You'll list several possible IIS applications and learn about the roles AI and ML play in creating them. Next, you'll identify significant components of IIS and the purpose of these components. You'll examine how you would go about creating a self-driving vehicle using IIS components. Finally, you'll work with Python libraries to build high-level components of a Markov decision process.

Final Exam: AI Practitioner will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the AI Practitioner track of the Skillsoft Aspire AI Apprentice to AI Architect Journey.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), a natural language processing technique, takes the capabilities of language AI systems to great heights. Google's BERT reports state-of-the-art performance on several complex tasks in natural language understanding. In this course, you'll examine the fundamentals of traditional NLP and distinguish them from more advanced techniques, like BERT. You'll identify the terms attention and transformer and how they relate to NLP. You'll then examine a series of real-life applications of BERT, such as in SEO and masking. Next, you'll work with an NLP pipeline utilizing BERT in Python for various tasks, namely, text tokenization and encoding, model definition and training, and data augmentation and prediction. Finally, you'll recognize the benefits of using BERT and TensorFlow together.

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) can be implemented in various ways, and it is up to AI practitioners to decide which one is the best for a particular product. It is also essential to recognize all of BERT's capabilities and its full potential in NLP. In this course, you'll outline the theoretical approaches to several BERT use cases before illustrating how to implement each of them. In full, you'll learn how to use BERT for search engine optimization, sentence prediction, sentence classification, token classification, and question answering, implementing a simple example for each use case discussed. Lastly, you'll examine some fundamental guidelines for using BERT for content optimization.

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Architect works and interacts with various groups in an organization, including IT Architects and IT Developers. It is important to differentiate between the work activities performed by these groups and how they work together. This course will introduce you to the AI Architect role. You'll discover what the role is, why it's important, and who the architect interacts with on a daily basis. We will also examine and categorize their daily work activities and will compare those activities with those of an IT Architect and an IT Developer. The AI Architect helps many groups within the organization, and we will examine their activities within those groups as well. Finally, we will highlight the roles the AI Architect plays in the organizations which they are a member of.

In this course, you'll be introduced to the concepts, methodologies, and tools required for effectively and efficiently incorporating AI into your IT enterprise planning. You'll look at enterprise planning from an AI perspective, and view projects in tactical/strategic and current, intermediate, or future state contexts. You'll explore how to use an AI Maturity Model to conduct an AI Maturity Assessment of the current and future states of AI planning, and how to conduct a gap analysis between those states. Next, you'll learn about the components of a discovery map, project complexity, and a variety of graphs and tables that enable you to handle complexity. You'll see how complexity can be significantly reduced using AI accelerators and how they affect specific phases of the AI development lifecycle. You'll move on to examine how to create an AI enterprise roadmap using all of the artifacts just described, plus a KPIs/Value Metrics table, and how both of these can be used as inputs to an analytics dashboard. Finally, you'll explore numerous examples of AI applications of different types in diverse business areas.

Designing successful and competitive AI products involves thorough research on its existing application in various markets. Most large scale businesses use AI in their workflows to optimize business operations. AI Architects should be aware of all possible applications of AI so they can look at market trends and come up with the most appropriate, novel, and useful AI solutions for their industry. In this course, you'll explore examples of standard AI applications in various industries like Finance, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, Transportation, Cybersecurity, Pharmaceutical, and Telecommunications. You'll examine how AI is utilized by leading AI companies within each of these industries. You'll identify which AI technologies are common across all industries and which are industry-specific. Finally, you'll recognize why AI is imperative to the successful operation of many industries.

AI architecture patterns, some of which have been known for many years, have been formally identified as such only in the last couple of years. In this course, you'll identify 12 reusable, standard AI architecture patterns, and 3 AI architecture anti-patterns frequently used to architect common AI applications. You'll learn to differentiate between architecture and design patterns and explore how they're used. Next, you'll examine the structure of an AI architecture pattern, and that of an anti-pattern and its different parts. You'll identify when specific patterns should or can be used, when they need to be avoided, and how to avoid using anti-patterns. You will also learn that even good patterns can become anti-patterns when applied to solve a problem they were not intended for.

Solid knowledge of the AI technology landscape is fundamental in choosing the right tools to use as an AI Architect. In this course, you'll explore the current and future AI technology landscape, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of common AI platforms and frameworks. You'll move on to examine AI libraries and pre-trained models, distinguishing their advantages and disadvantages. You'll then classify AI datasets and see a list of dataset topics. Finally, You'll learn how to make informed decisions about which AI technology is best suited to your projects.

The inner workings of many deep learning systems are complicated, if not impossible, for the human mind to comprehend. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide AI experts with transparency into these systems. In this course, you'll describe what Explainable AI is, how to use it, and the data structures behind XAI's preferred algorithms. Next, you'll explore the interpretability problem and today's state-of-the-art solutions to it. You'll identify XAI regulations, define the "right to explanation", and illustrate real-world examples where this has been applicable. You'll move on to recognize both the Counterfactual and Axiomatic methods, distinguishing their pros and cons. You'll investigate the intelligible models method, along with the concepts of monotonicity and rationalization. Finally, you'll learn how to use a Generative Adversarial Network.

Final Exam: AI Architect will test your knowledge and application of the topics presented throughout the AI Architect track of the Skillsoft Aspire AI Apprentice to AI Architect Journey.