Tag: Education

Udacity Festival 2018 This Weekend

Udacity Festival 2018 is coming this weekend!

This is an online event for Udacity students and alumni to learn from and connect with each other, as well as to hear from Udacity staff. Since Udacity is an online education institution with students all around the world, this is a virtual event, taking place online throughout the weekend.

The Festival will feature:

“Presentations covering everything from pitching projects and landing new jobs, to career change and entrepreneurial success.

Exclusive digital meetups for each Udacity school — Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems, Business, Data Science, and Programming.

Panel discussions with alumni sharing their career advancement strategies.
… and so much more!”

As a teaser, the School of Autonomous Systems event will feature a ride in Carla, Udacity’s self-drivng car!

As if that weren’t enough, I will engage is a special round of Carla Karaoke. You will not believe my closing number. Like, literally, you will not believe it. You will watch me sing it and still will not believe I chose this song.

RSVP here!

Course Report: Control of Mobile Robots

The online course I’ve been working on most rigorously of late [although I’m still one week behind 😦 ], is Control of Mobile Robots.

The course is offered via Coursera, and taught by Magnus Egerstedt and his team at Georgia Tech.

I really like this course!

It offers a great introduction to control theory, and hits the right blend of mathematics and applications for me.

We just finished the distinction and relationship between controllability and observability. These are good introductory concepts and they were conveyed at an introductory level, which I think will provide a solid foundation for more advanced courses.

I’ve written previously of my love for Udacity, which has found a great formula for teaching technical courses on its own platform. Coursera has different strengths and weaknesses, and Control of Mobile Robots is a great example of its strengths.

This course is a relatively obscure topic, so Coursera’s partnerships with major universities enable Coursera to bring this course to the world much faster than Udacity’s in-house production model.

Often the cost for this flexibility is that Coursera courses are of uneven quality. But this course has super-high production values, which I think is a result of Georgia Tech’s focus on online education.