University of Helsinki, Finland offers online Artificial Intelligence course and anyone anywhere can enroll for free!

tech2 News StaffMay 21, 2018 20:48:14 IST

While a lot of companies like Google who have integrated artificial intelligence into their systems, there is a growing curiosity amongst individuals to understand the technology better and how it has started to affect our everyday lives.

What is AI?

The University of Helsinki in Finland has launched a completely free and open course on Artificial intelligence. It is more of a beginner course.

The academic and business partners say they want Finland to become forerunners in AI, and have developed an online course covering the quickly-growing technology open to anyone, free of charge.

The online course is called The Elements of Artificial Intelligence and is available completely in English.

To enroll in the course, there are no prerequisites and it is available globally.

You have an option to do the course at your own pace, but they recommend trying to finish in 6 weeks, however, according to their understanding, having a deadline makes it more likely that students will finish the course.

The course was designed by the University of Helsinki and Reaktor. The lead instructor of the course is Associate Professor Teemu Roos and the course is a part of the AI Education programme of the Finnish Center for AI.

It is a 6-part course including subjects like: What is AI?, Solving problems with AI, Real world AI, Machine Learning, Neural networks and Implications. Each part will take approximately 5-10 hours to finish. They say that some exercises require a lot of thinking, drawing on paper and going back to the theory part which can take up to 45 minutes.

There is little math involved though. It won’t be advanced math and the course is designed so that no pre-existing knowledge beyond basic math is expected.

Students in Finland can even earn academic credits through the Open University. People who enroll in the course outside Finland have an option to receive a certificate that can be posted on the Linkedin page. Everyone who completes the course will also get a certificate (PDF) emailed to them in the end.

As reported on yle.fi, the user interface designer at Reaktor Janina Fagerlund, said that "It's a new and cool discovery, but no one yet knows what it can be used for, or what impact it will have in practice."

"Everyone wants to learn what AI is because they think it will be a big deal in the future. They want to know how AI will affect their lives and how they can make use of it," Fagerlund said.

It also said that Fagerlund hopes that major social problems such as carbon emissions could be addressed with the help of AI.