Up next you’ll be choosing a concentration in either Voice User Interfaces, Natural Language Processing, or Computer Vision. We are super excited to tell you that we’ve teamed up with some of the biggest names in industry—Amazon, IBM, and Affectiva—who will be happy to guide you through their innovations in these fields. Among other experts, your instructors will include Ashwin Ram, Senior Manager of the Alexa team at Amazon, Armen Pischdotchian, Academic Tech Mentor for IBM Watson Solutions, and Rana el Kaliouby, the CEO and co-founder at Affectiva!

Concentration 1: Voice User Interfaces with Amazon Alexa

In this concentration, you’ll learn how computers can process speech, turn it into text, and vice versa. In the first part, you’ll get an overview of Voice User Interfaces (VUI), focus on Conversational AI, and learn how Alexa operates. Then, you’ll dive deeper into the exciting field of Speech Recognition, learning Signal Analysis and Phonetics, single word classification using Dynamic Time Warping, and sentence recognition using Hidden Markov Models. Finally, you’ll learn about the cutting edge in Automatic Speech Recognition, leveraging deep neural networks.

Concentration 2: Natural Language Processing with IBM Watson

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fascinating field in which we teach computers to understand and analyze text. In this concentration, you’ll learn to decompose a problem that involves analyzing natural language text into tasks, perform fundamental NLP operations, such as building an N-gram language model from a given corpus, and labelling words in a sentence with Part-of-Speech (POS) tags and as named entities. You will accomplish end-to-end NLP tasks such as document classification, machine translation, etc., using a combination of custom processing and cloud-based APIs.

Concentration 3: Computer Vision with Affectiva

Inspired by human vision, Computer Vision aims to give machines the ability to see and interpret the world by extracting information from images. In this concentration, you’ll learn the fundamentals of computer vision and the role it plays in artificial intelligence systems. Computer vision is used in many applications, from detecting skin cancer to emotion recognition (and even self-driving car navigation!). Throughout this term, you’ll develop practical skills and get hands-on coding experience with many of these real-world applications. You’ll learn to break down any problem that involves visual perception into computer vision tasks, such as: enhancing images, applying color and geometric transformations to change the appearance of an image, detecting object boundaries, computing gradients and filtering images, and extracting features like object edges and unique visual patterns. We’ll go over these foundational computer vision techniques in detail. Then, you’ll utilize what you’ve learned to create a complete AI system that uses computer vision to perform smart object detection and activity recognition.