I’ve completed another 4 month Coursera Machine Learning course. The first was the Andrew NG’s Machine Learning course, and the second is Geoffrey Hinton’s Neural Networks for Machine Learning course. I also completed a 2 month Coursera course in Computation Neuroscience.
Course certificate
Both courses use Matlab, and this second one was significantly more work and buggier. Several of the exam questions had key bits of information accidentally left out and referred to images that didn’t exist. Only by referring to the user forums could the key bits of information be found out. However I was one of the first people to do this course, so bugs are to be expected.
Technical issues aside, I enjoyed the course a lot. It’s approximately 5 years behind the current state of the field, but the information is still very relevant.
Edit: Update on 2017/2/5 – I also did the 2 month Computational Neuroscience course:
I enjoyed the first half of the course, which was all new and interesting to me. But the second half was just a basic version of the Andrew Ng course.
John Tapsell 
Hi John, can you share with me the experience when you study the second course: Neural Network for Machine Learning? Hope to wait your response
LikeLike
I thought the Neural Networks for Machine Learning was **extremely good**, and one of the best courses that I’ve done 🙂
To be more specific:
* It gives a foundation only. You learn the concepts, but you will not be able to actually do anything with it. It doesn’t teach how to use any of the libraries, nor does you learn any of the moderns tricks and techniques. So you will have to follow it up with a course or self-study in the area that you actually want to know about
* The Coursera lectures are like interesting university lectures. Each lecture is substantial, and goes into real detail. This kind of teaching really fits me, and I really like this style of teaching. But this in contrast to Udacity, where each video is only 30 seconds to a minute long (I’m not exaggerating!). And half of that time is spent praising and congratulating you for making it that far. And all the production effort is spent making cute animations.
* Hinton is a famous expert, and really knows his stuff. He is to be respected. 🙂
LikeLike