Learning and Motivation, School of AI, Student Success

Machine Learning Improves your Shopping Experience

Machine learning is impacting countless industries, from the recent discovery of a black hole to improving healthcare, we are just scratching the surface. The retail industry is a prime example. Retailers and manufacturers are racing to figure out how they can employ machine learning to target specific consumers, monitor trends, and discover new pricing models.

While retailers and manufacturers are doubling down on new ways to target and sell to consumers, Jia Rui Ong, a two-time Nanodegree program graduate, and his team are employing machine learning to help you, the consumer, find the best price for the clothing you desire.

We recently had a chance to sit down with Jia Rui Ong and his team at Yux to discuss their product, as well as, our newly updated Machine Learning Nanodegree program.

Announcements, Featured, School of AI

Amazon Web Services and Udacity collaborate to offer Machine Learning Nanodegree with Amazon SageMaker

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We’re working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their AWS Educate program to teach you how to deploy machine learning models using Amazon SageMaker.

Over the past few years, the demand for machine learning specialists and engineers has soared, with machine learning engineers and specialists ranking amongst the top emerging jobs on LinkedIn. Recently, machine learning has been adopted by a wide range of industries, including medical diagnostic companies, finance firms, and more. Udacity’s Intro to Machine Learning Nanodegree program and Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program were built in response to this demand to provide access to this growing tech field.

We’ve seen advances in research and industry practices as more companies look to build machine learning products. Specifically, there is a growing demand for engineers who are able to deploy machine learning models to a global audience. Deployment means making a model available for use in a piece of hardware or web application, such as a voice assistant or recommendation engine. Knowing how to build machine learning models is a great starting point, but to truly make an impact at scale, a data scientist or programmer needs to know the techniques and tools to deploy that model so that it’s highly accessible.

To keep up with this advancement and bring the best educational experience to our students, we are updating the Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree program to include the latest skills by adding two new projects focused on deployment skills.

School of Autonomous Systems, School of Data Science

‘Jupyter Graffiti’ Interactive Screencasts Make Their Debut in Our New C++ Nanodegree Program

Jupyter Notebooks are fantastic tools for learning any technical topic, from basic programming to data science all the way to advanced artificial intelligence. Like a web page, you can read and review learning content; and like a traditional programming environment, Notebooks can be “hands-on”. Notebooks invite you to experiment with the code and data cells alongside the equations and graphs.

But have you ever wished an instructor was sitting right next to you when you’re stuck on something, to “show you how she would solve it?”

Graffiti brings that instructor into the Notebook, and makes Udacity’s new C++ Nanodegree Program an amazing way for software engineers to learn the C++ programming language!

Jupyter Notebook Graffiti programming mini terminal example

Jupyter Graffiti are recorded, interactive demonstrations that live inside your Notebooks.

Via Jupyter Graffiti, Udacity instructors show you exactly how to solve each problem. They walk you through the content, pointing, selecting, typing and executing code, adding and removing code cells, and more. As a student, you can play these recordings as many times as you want, or not at all, and pause and rewind them to see the instructor write and explain the code again.

Featured, Learning and Motivation, School of Data Science

Master Data Modeling: Become a Data Engineer with Udacity

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Real-world projects are integral to every Udacity Nanodegree program. They become the foundation for a job-ready portfolio to help learners advance their careers in their chosen field. The projects in the Data Engineer Nanodegree program were designed in collaboration with a group of highly talented industry professionals to ensure learners develop the most in-demand skills. Every project in a Nanodegree program is human-graded by a member of Udacity’s mentor and reviewer network. These project reviews include detailed, personalized feedback on how learners can improve their work. Graduates consistently rate projects and project reviews as one of the best parts of their experience with Udacity.

The Project Journey

The projects will take you on a journey where you’ll assume the role of a Data Engineer at a fabricated data streaming company called “Sparkify” as it scales its data engineering in both size and sophistication. You’ll work with simulated data of listening behavior, as well as a wealth of metadata related to songs and artists. You’ll start-, working with a small amount of data, with low complexity, processed and stored on a single machine. By the end, you’ll develop a sophisticated set of data pipelines to work with massive amounts of data processed and stored on the cloud.

School of Autonomous Systems, Student Success

C++ Skills and Career Advice from a Self-Driving Car Engineer

This week we launched the new C++ Nanodegree program, designed to teach students the industry-relevant programming skills to code robotics, self-driving cars, media platforms, servers, and fast-performance applications! We’re excited about this new program and thought our students might be, too. David Silver, head of Udacity’s School of Autonomous Systems, reached out to one of our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program (SDC) graduates, Jeremy Cohen, to get an idea of how he uses C++ in his work as an Artificial Intelligence and Self-Driving Car Engineer.

David: Hello Jeremy, you completed our Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program last year and it’s contributed to some career changes in your life, could you tell us a bit about that?

Jeremy: That’s correct. I think it’s important to give a bit of context around my education experience. I live in France, and here, when you decide that you’re interested in engineering, you are given a couple of education and career paths to choose from. In my case, after high school, I enrolled in engineering school, with a focus on computer science. I enjoyed my studies, and during the last six months, I took part in an internship to gain industry experience. Unlike in America, many of these internships begin with managerial roles. I spent a year or so working as a project manager for an artificial intelligence banking initiative.

It was going well and I felt proficient in my role, but I had this growing feeling that I wasn’t actually proficient in the technology that I was managing. I could manage the project deadlines and lead our team to the next step, but I wasn’t able to speak the technical language, understand the concepts, or review the code we were implementing.

I started to research avenues to gain more technical skills to supplement my university and project management background. I considered going back for another degree, but even that didn’t seem like the way to gain current industry-relevant skills. In talking with my brother about the situation, he said: “Go check out Udacity, they offer the type of skills you’re looking for.”

I landed on udacity.com, watched a video about the new Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree program and immediately knew – this was what I had been looking for. It didn’t force me to spend another year at school, was self-paced, and would allow me to grow in skills I needed. I applied for the program within 30 minutes.

Announcements, School of Autonomous Systems

Learn C++ to Code Self-Driving Cars, Robotics, and More Complex Systems

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C++ is an efficient, high-performance programming language used to code everything from self-driving cars and robotics to servers, media platforms, video games, and applications that require blazing-fast performance. It is known as one of the top five most important programming languages, and today, Udacity is excited to launch the C++ Nanodegree program to equip students with advanced skills in C++ so that they can launch or advance a career programming the most exciting technology in the world.

“Self-driving cars would not be possible without C++,” says Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun. “I programmed the self-driving car that won the DARPA Grand Challenge using C++. The Google Self-Driving Car Project, now called Waymo, was launched with C++.”

Demand for engineers with C++ skills is growing as employers search for talent to work on complex autonomous and artificial intelligence software systems. According to Glassdoor’s salary database, as of March 2019, C++ Developers in the US average a yearly salary of $103,000, 43% more than the average Javascript Developer salary. As the top skill needed for autonomous vehicle jobs, C++ is the language powering the future of technology and transportation.

An Overview of the C++ Nanodegree Program

The C++ Nanodegree program will take about five months to complete, and teaches fundamentals and advanced skills in object-oriented programming, memory management, and concurrency. Designed for software engineers with programming knowledge in any language, this program will teach students practical C++ skills through five real-world projects, programming exercises, videos, and quizzes. Throughout the program, the Udacity Classroom will function as an online workspace in which students use Microsoft Visual Studio Code to practice the conventions outlined in Bjarne Stroustrup’s C++ Core Guidelines.

School of Data Science, Student Success

Data Analytics + Healthcare: How Rebecca Found Her Career Passion

Throughout Women’s History Month we’ve introduced you to five incredible women over the past few weeks who have taken the idea of balance to a whole new level; showing us how, no matter what your calendar looks like, it is possible to balance your job, social, and extracurricular activities while pursuing career advancement and new skills.

Data Analyst Rebecca McDowall Udacity graduate

Rebecca McDowall succeeded in changing careers and landing a new job at a top tech company, Accenture. Today, she is analyzing the healthcare sector, looking for ways to improve the data of today for a better healthcare industry of tomorrow. We had a chance to speak with her and learn more about her journey.

Have you always been interested in data?

In a way, yes. I graduated from university in 2016 with a degree in mathematics and statistics. Initially, I chose math purely based on my interest in statistics; I loved the real-world applicability and how you can find data in relatively any part of life. But, I didn’t love the mathematics portion of the degree and when I graduated and started looking for jobs, I felt pretty lost.

Were you interested in any industry or particular job?

My mother works in healthcare and I always had an awareness of how important, yet stressful her job could be. I had a keen interest in trying to work alongside healthcare, possibly healthcare economics. Though I looked, I couldn’t find any entry-level positions based on my degree, so I ended up taking a job as an audio typist for the histopathology department whilst trying to gain internship experience in healthcare economics

I knew this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, but I also knew it was a job in the industry I was curious about. After a few months, I became frustrated; it was boring and didn’t offer any true advancements further into the industry. A friend had also shared a website that detailed jobs of today that might be replaced by technology in the future, and my job was one of them. This got me thinking: how was technology evolving and how could I take advantage of emerging skills?