HYDERABAD: With automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning seeping into various facets of business operations including IT enabled services companies, techies are heading the online route and informal meet-ups to get various course material and insights to gain an edge and be more marketable for future job demands.The certifications provided by such online courses are deemed valuable and even accepted by companies, considering the fact that very few colleges and institutes provide such training.
For instance, Hyderabad Machine learning, an informal Facebook group of machine learning experts, data analysts and artificial intelligence developers, has over 213 members as part of it. The group also held 13 meet-ups in Hyderabad on various topics including video analytics, machine learning with Titanic data set and neural networks to name a few.
“The term deep learning is a fancy term. We are trying to share our knowledge and information with those who are interested because its novelty is wrongly used by a few institutes who charge a hefty amount for coaching,” said Aakash Kag, organiser of the meet-up and AI developer.With any new project introduced in the web, there will always be supporting material which would be given, that material is misused by a few coaching centres who just give basic learning, he added.The technologies which will soon be the face of the future has a minimal reach, especially in Hyderabad where there are a handful coaching centres available.
Though such centres are either expensive or just give foundational information, course materials are available on Courseera.com, neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com and Stanford.edu. These websites become the go-to option source for techies which are free and in some cases they cost minimal. “As a working professional it is hard to take out time and learn at institutes, instead I get all my materials online and study for a couple of hours to become future ready,” said a techie from Cognizant on condition of anonymity.
Not just that, many techies including those from management background have been active in being part of offline meet-ups in Hyderabad which has gained more prominence in the backdrop of IT slowdown.
However, there are also concerns raised on its practicability considering its budding stage. “Not all materials can be directly put into practice, there should be some reasonable implementation to substantiate its viability,” said Srikanth Srinivasan, Regional Director, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM).