Since a couple of weeks, the study trip courses have begun. These two, educational courses are mandatory for each participant of the study trip. In a previous blog post, I already gave some information about one of them, the machine learning course. The biggest part of this course is being done via a Coursera MOOC on machine learning by Andrew Ng (Co-founder, Coursera; Adjunct Professor, Stanford University; formerly head of Baidu AI Group/Google Brain). This online course is meant to be done in 11 weeks, however, we will spread it out over the full semester instead, to reduce the extra study load of the already busy students. The content of this course was mentioned in the previous post. Besides the MOOC, several guest speakers will visit us to give a guest lecture about this interesting field of science. Next to that, lab sessions will be held, in which we will apply our knowledge in practice. Students work in duos.
The second course is the so-called Study trip theme course (STTC). In this course, students do a literature research on a topic of choice. Each of these topics has some relation with machine learning. Examples of topics are “the cultural difference of robot integration between South-Korea/Japan and Europe”, “Machine learning methods on home automation systems” and “reinforcement learning for training unity games”. The aim of the course is to write an academic paper about the topic of choice and present the work in a presentation. In addition to the paper, the students will deliver a product proposal (idea) to their client, based on the research performed to show how their research can be applied to (consumer) applications.
Both these courses are worth 5 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System). This makes a total of 10 ECTS which is equivalent to about 250 hours of study.