
Amazon's ML University is making its online courses available to the public - karxxm
https://www.amazon.science/latest-news/machine-learning-course-free-online-from-amazon-machine-learning-university
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nelsondev
I took a number of these courses as an Amazon software engineer and I found
them very useful.

Amazon’s goal of the internal program is to train Software Engineers to know
enough about data science to be effective as “machine learning engineers.”
Once trained, software engineers can either implement models themselves, or
more likely, partner with a data science team to productionize a model.

The courses by Brent Werness are particularly good, he has a knack for
explaining the intuition behind the math, pulling back the layers of
abstraction, so it’s not just “call scikitlearn and cross your fingers.”

Some of the more advanced topic courses like Natural Language Processing are
particularly challenging, as the material is more of a survey of the latest
research papers, to give you an idea of the state of the art, but
understanding the mathematical tools is non trivial.

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ivan_ah
Links to course playlists on youtube:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC12LqyqTQYbXatYS9AA7Nuw/pla...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC12LqyqTQYbXatYS9AA7Nuw/playlists)

and the corresponding github repos: [https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aaws-
samples+%22aws-machine...](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Aaws-
samples+%22aws-machine-learning%22)

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Hokusai
I really appreciate this kind of courses. And I would like to see more
produced from public institutions. As good as Google or now Amazon courses
are, I have seen too many colleagues that instead of engineers are Google
extperts or Amazon experts and lack a broad view of software engineering.

I love company specific courses to get knowledge that helps my company to
evaluate which product to purchase. But, I dread to work with colleagues that
invest their curriculum in a company and become radical protectors of that
company. Software engineering is more that knowing the API for product A or B.

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heliodor
> Software engineering is more that knowing the API for product A or B.

You're confusing software engineering for computer science.

Software engineering on average is indeed knowing the APIs of a few frameworks
or products well.

~~~
NegatioN
I'm inclined to agree with you, but I'm guessing OP is referring to
"craftsmanship in software engineering", which is probably a mix of both
computer science and other habits formed over many years of conscious focus on
improvement?

One of those habits could be how to generally solve a problem, versus how to
just duct-tape together a solution. If we don't understand something from
first principles, we don't really understand it in my opinion.

I'm lucky to mostly work with people who're both good at their craft, as well
as good at "getting the job done". For me personally it would be frustrating
to be subjected to massive tech-debt generation and sub-optimal solutions just
because the team is unwilling to step outside a walled garden.

~~~
scarface74
_If we don 't understand something from first principles, we don't really
understand it in my opinion._

How many modern developers have written a single line of assembly yet alone
written production assembly code? How many have even written C or used any
other language that doesn’t have garbage collection.

Everyone who started working on a technology before abstractions make it more
accessible think that you really need to understand deeper to be effective.

I had to get out of that mode of thinking myself as I’ve been in the software
field either as a hobbyist or professionally for 35 years and I did start off
writing assembly as a hobbyist (and some as a professional) and spent a decade
writing C.

But then, I also see the same attitude from old school infrastructure guys now
that I live part of my life on that side of the world when they say I really
need to understand the “fundamentals” of IT and I can’t possibly be effective
as a consultant if my only experience standing up infrastructure is writing a
yaml file.

At the end of the day not everyone needs to understand the fundamentals to get
their work done and create business value no more than your software as a
service CRUD developer needs to know how to reverse a binary tree on the
whiteboard.

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throwawaysea
What would be the criteria to say ML is becoming another commoditized skillset
sort of like how cloud computing or mobile app development eventually became?
I feel like there is a big increase in these types of resources that make it
possible for anyone (with necessary background) to learn.

~~~
tikhonj
There are resources out there to learn _any_ tech skill with the necessary
background—and resources to pick up the necessary background if you don't have
it. At the same time, tech as a whole is not (fully) commoditized, at least in
the sense that there is a wide range to the market and a lot of
differentiation towards to top end of the skill distribution.

My impression is that ML is getting to the point where you can do useful ML
for _some_ businesses without needing particularly deep expertise or
creativity so I could see a commoditized lower end to the market developing
(just like you can get a generic mobile app from a random consultancy), but
there will still be a lot of important business problems that are too hard to
tackle that way, leaving a lot of room for experts in the market as well.

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barry-cotter
This is a fantastic initiative, like the Career Certificates Google announced
lately [1]. I do wonder why Amazon didn’t partner with Coursera, EdX or
similar to offer certification along with the knowledge. Anything that makes
learning more legible is to Amazon’s benefit as a giant hiring machine limited
by the attention of technical talent. If they offered certs they could
(perhaps) allow the holders to skip one stage of interviews, like a phone
screen, or even just automatically allow them access to Amazon’s coding screen
like Hacker Rank.

[1] [https://grow.google/certificates/](https://grow.google/certificates/)

~~~
scarface74
_If they offered certs they could (perhaps) allow the holders to skip one
stage of interviews_

For all that is holy I hope not - speaking as a consultant who works at AWS. I
held a number of AWS certifications before being hired. I used them mostly as
a guided learning path to help me know what I didn’t know. I also had “enough”
real world experience as both a developer and working with AWS’s fiddly bits
to be useful relatively quickly when I started working here.

I saw far too many “paper tigers” when I was in the real world who have all of
the certifications you could imagine but couldn’t pass my relatively simple
tech screen when I was hiring operations people to take some of the load off
of me so I could concentrate on some development projects.

Certifications in no way prove competency.

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arminiusreturns
My guess: using all amazon tools to get you tied into their stack. This is an
Amazon MO I don't likeand have seen frequently (along withmany stockholm
syndromed users). I hope I'm wrong though.

~~~
giaour
When I took some of these courses at Amazon, they were taught using open
source tools like numpy and mxnet. Assignments and enrollments used an
internal platform, and most hands-on work used a Jupyter-like platform that I
don't believe is offered as an external service.

There was a special session offered at one point that covered how to apply
what you had learned using AWS services like SageMaker, but it wasn't
integrated into the curriculum. (Not sure if this is still the case; I took
MLU courses in early 2019.)

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sunilkumarc
This is exciting for all the learners!

On a different note, recently I was looking to learn AWS concepts through
online courses. After so much of research I finally found this e-book on
Gumroad which is written by Daniel Vassallo who has worked in AWS team for 10+
years. I found this e-book very helpful as a beginner.

This book covers most of the topics that you need to learn to get started:

If someone is interested, here is the link :)

[https://gumroad.com/a/238777459/MsVlG](https://gumroad.com/a/238777459/MsVlG)

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bstar77
I'm very interested in giving these classes a shot when they become available.
I have been working on a tool (for 4 years now) for a hockey simulation that
tracks growth of players and I try to do some predictive analysis, but I have
limited knowledge on that subject. I would love to use proper ML techniques to
predict player success based on the data points I capture.

I'm fine to use Amazon's cloud services for the course, but I hope they are
not required. That will severely limit the usefulness of the course for me.

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tosh
I hope Apple will eventually open up their internal university.

~~~
xamdam
Is it known to be particularly good?

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sixhobbits
Is this free? I would expect a release blog post to contain more basic details
and fewer internal marketing links.

~~~
grtehy
Scroll up. There's a link to the videos and code in one of the comments.

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simonebrunozzi
Lack of this in the past is what led to the founding of Cloud Academy, several
years ago.

I played an important role in giving shape to the company, and in 2019 we sold
it to QA Learning. Great experience. Good $$$ outcome.

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pcbro141
Why doesn't Amazon have amazing or even just 'good' product recommendations if
they have all these ML experts?

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neeeeees
I think it’s just a much harder problem than Netflix or Youtube
recommendations - Amazon has at least 500 million products, and people aren’t
buying individual products at the same scale as they watch videos. Has anyone
with >1000 products really nailed product recommendations without large
precision losses?

~~~
allpratik
That's so true. And it's not just the relevance part of it, we have to even
incorporate few operational cues as well while recommending products. Not for
Amazon but for a different marketplace, I manage the recommendation engine as
a product and we have incorporated product serviceability to customer's
address as one of the parameters. Then the usual e-comm stuff kicks in like,
out of stock issues, price elasticity during sale periods, new
product/category launches etc.

Obviously, I do not want to discount other non-commerce recommendation engines
like Spotfiy's or Netflix. They are great in their own ways, but e-comm is
quite a different ball game. The cross sell model is really hard to crack if
you have 1000s of competing sub categories and millions of products in them to
fill in your top 10-20 slots.

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mesaframe
I am observing many companies have released their courses. In the process what
any of that makes them special?

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chris_st
Special?

I think what makes them _interesting_ is that now I have a lot of choice in
which classes to take... maybe someone will set up a "Rotten Tomatoes" site to
rate online classes.

I don't want to take every single NLP class, but if I take one here, and don't
quite get it, perhaps the Google (or Stanford, or whoever) course will make it
click for me, or offer some alternative insight or useful method.

So I'm glad they're putting them up. Thanks Amazon!

~~~
xiphias2
Do you mean something like this?

[https://www.classcentral.com/collection/top-free-online-
cour...](https://www.classcentral.com/collection/top-free-online-courses)

It already contains some really interesting ones that I wouldn't have found
out otherwise.

~~~
chris_st
Awesome! Thanks for posting this!

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mbhep27
Awesome! They’re great courses.

