Building on the momentum† of completing the Data Science track of the Microsoft
Professional Program, and inspired by the amazing season 2 of Westworld, I have now also completed the Artificial Intelligence track, Microsoft’s internal AI course just opened to the public. This combines theory with Python programming (no R option this time sadly) for deep learning (DL) and reinforcement learning (RL), leading up to a Capstone project, which I completed with Keras and CNTK, scoring 100% this time. Of the 4 available optional courses, I chose Natural Language Processing. The track also includes a course on the ethical implications of AI/machine learning/data science, something that should be mandatory for the employees of certain companies…

I had had some exposure to neural nets earlier but this was my first encounter with RL, and that was easily my favourite and the most rewarding part, and definitely something I want to explore further, with tools like OpenAI Gym.  A fair amount of independent reading is needed to answer the assessment questions in this and the other more advanced courses; obviously I was not looking to be spoon-fed but it would have been better for it to be self-contained. Rumsfeld’s Theory applies here; if you don’t know what you don’t know, how can you assess the validity or currency of an external source? Such as what has changed in Sutton & Barto between the 1^st edition (1998) and the 2^nd (October 2018, so not actually published yet!) , and which one was the person who set the assessment questions reading? Or the latest edition of Jurafsky & Martin?Many students raised this concern in the forum and the edX proctor said they were taking the feedback on board so perhaps by the time any readers of this blog come to it, it will be improved.  The NLP course was particularly bad for this, I wonder if something was missed when MS reworked them for an external audience? So frustrating when it is such an interesting subject!

Obviously there is not the depth of theory in these relatively short courses to do academic research in the field of AI. Each of the later courses  (7-9) takes a few weeks but to go fully in depth would take a year or more. But there is certainly enough to understand how the relevant maths corresponds to and interacts with the moving parts, and to confidently identify situations or problems DL and RL could be applied to, and to subsequently implement and operationalize a solution with open source tooling, Azure, or both. Overall I am pretty happy with the experience. I learnt an awful lot, and have plenty of avenues in addition to RL mentioned previously to go on exploring, and have picked up both a long term foundation and some skills that are immediately useful in the short term. Understanding the maths is so important to be able to develop intuition, and is an investment that will continue to pay off even as the technologies change. Working on this part time over several months, I am very conscious that a lot of this stuff is quite “use it or lose it”‘ so I will need to maintain the momentum and internalize it all properly. For my next course I think I’ll do Neuronal Dynamics or maybe something purely practical.

Oh, and I previously mentioned that I had finally upgraded my late-2008 Macbook Pro to a Surface Laptop. The lack of a discrete GPU‡ on this particular model means that the final computation for the Capstone took about an hour to complete… On a NC6 instance in Azure I am seeing speedups of 4-10× on the K80, which is actually less than I had expected, but still pretty good and I expect the gap would open up with larger datasets. I think I will stick with renting a GPU instance for now, until my Azure bill indicates its time to invest in a desktop PC with a 1080, I’m just not sure that it makes sense on a laptop. Extensive use is made in these courses of Jupyter Notebook, which when running locally is pretty clunky compared to the MathCAD I remember using as a Mech Eng undergrad in the ’90’s, but there is no denying that Azure Notebooks is very convenient, and it’s free!

It begins with the birth of a new people, and the choices they’ll have to make and the people they will decide to become.

Did I mention that I am obsessed with Westworld?

† A 3-course overlap/headstart!

‡ PlaidML is nearly 2x as fast as CNTK on the same processor with integrated GPU, but less accuracy in my experiments so you need more epochs anyway, it depends where the lines cross for your specific hardware and workload.