Course Review - Advanced Certificate Programme in ML and DL offered by IIIT - Bengaluru via upGrad

The programme is designed for intermediate to expert-level working professionals who want to nurture their skills in Machine Learning and Deep Learning through industry-relevant case studies and live webinars with industry experts and the faculty of IIIT-Bengaluru. The course is designed to offer deep insights into practical use cases and implementation-based studies to generate value from these cutting-edge technologies.

Machine Learning and Deep Learning are core domains of this certification programme which is offered by IIIT Bangalore and offers an opportunity to be a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer. Applicants must check their eligibility before applying for the course. This programme offered by upGrad is conducted for a period of eight months. Read this upGrad AI ML course review, to get to know the course closely.

Highlights

Differentiated Value

The Advanced Certificate Programme in Machine Learning and Deep Learning offers a focused learning approach towards ML and DL. The course is in collaboration with IIIT-Bengaluru which is considered to be one of the top institutes. upGrad also ensures that the end goal of the participants is achieved which is transitioning to a better profile of a Senior Data scientist, DL engineer and Data analyst by providing Career mentorship sessions, high-performance coaching, just-in-time interviews, and industry readiness assessments.

Content coverage: The programme covers 240+ hours of learning, 5+ case studies, 64 live sessions and 12+ tools, languages and libraries. The program includes 80 learning hours in the form of recorded content, there is active teaching of 80 (approx.) hours offered in the form of live sessions. Some of the case studies, as per upGrad, are listed below.

• Investment Analysis: Participants will fill in the shoes of an analyst at an investment bank and determine where the firm should invest.

• Lending Club Case study: Determine which customers are at risk of default and what are their characteristics to avoid providing loans to similar people in the future.

• Car Price Prediction: Build a model to understand the factors car prices vary on and help a Chinese company enter the US car market.

• House Price Prediction: Build a model to understand the factors house prices vary on and help an American company enter the Australian housing market.

• Telecom Churn Case: Solve the most crucial business problem for a leading telecom operator in India and Southeast Asia - predicting customer churn.

• CNN assignment: Build a custom CNN model to accurately classify skin cancer cells.

• Gesture Recognition Case study: Make a Smart TV system that can control the TV with the user’s hand gestures as the remote control using 3D CNN & RNN

Mode of Learning: The programme is completely online which includes 80 learning hours in the form of recorded content. There is active teaching of 80 (approximately.) hours offered in the form of live sessions.

Target Audience: The difficulty level of the certification is Intermediate to expert. However, the course is designed to offer the basics as well as to build a foundation. The course is recommended for working professionals who are working in basic analytics roles and beginners with strong aptitude and coding skills.

Learning support: Participants have access to personalized career couches and interaction with industry experts to learn and develop peer-to-peer learning. Furthermore, participants have access to career coaches who help in guiding individual career paths and offer targeted advice to achieve career goals. Students will have full access to learning boards, alumni roundtables, 1-1 coaching and learning sessions. However, no alumni status is offered by IIIT-B.

Price Aid: The programme does not offer any scholarships. However, early-bird discounts are provided to participants along with 0 interest in EMI programmes and corporate sponsorship.

College pedigree: The course is backed by a strong college pedigree as it is continuously ranked number one across a number of surveys.

Major Differentiator from Peers

The course offers a focused approach towards ML and DL which can help in better learning. Most of the other courses offer multiple-domain learning which dilutes the final learning absorption of a student. Case studies are industry-relevant, and the programme offers a good mix of recorded sessions as well as live webinars. Career support sessions and alumni roundtables offer added differentiated value to a participant along with a strong brand like IIIT-B on the resume.

Course Offering

The following points cover the major offerings by the certification.

• Placement support with 1:1 mentoring sessions. The course also offers good interaction avenues with industry experts who deal with practical use cases.

• Updated learning content with 40 hours of GPU usage (via external vendors such as Jarvis labs) for computational intensive case studies.

• 80 hours of live learning through webinars. Small group coaching is also offered as an added support towards career transitions.

• 240+ hours of learning content with a focused approach towards Deep Learning.

• The certificate is offered directly from IIT-B which offers good value to one’s resume. upGrad name does not appear on the certificate.

What Stood Out

Positives: 80+ hours of live learning, early-bird discounts, focused learning approach, 1:1 career coaching, strong peer-to-peer learning avenues.

Scope for improvisation: Lack of discussion boards. No scholarships, but one can opt for early bird discounts and 0 interest EMI. No alumni status is offered by IIIT-B. However, one must keep in mind that this is just an eight-month course and most short courses do not offer an alumni status.

Career options

Data Scientist: As a Data Scientist one is required to use his or her domain expertise in conjunction with technical know-how to process algorithms and use that knowledge across various vertices of a company or an organisation.

Data Analyst: A Data analyst is a professional who studies, processes and cleans the data in order to locate important information and arrive at problem-solving conclusions that help further in decision-making.