What Is Programming? And How To Get Started
January 28, 2025
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Instructors: Mark J Grover
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This six course specialization is designed to prepare you to take the certification examination for IBM AI Enterprise Workflow V1 Data Science Specialist. IBM AI Enterprise Workflow is a comprehensive, end-to-end process that enables data scientists to build AI solutions, starting with business priorities and working through to taking AI into production. The learning aims to elevate the skills of practicing data scientists by explicitly connecting business priorities to technical implementations, connecting machine learning to specialized AI use cases such as visual recognition and NLP, and connecting Python to IBM Cloud technologies. The videos, readings, and case studies in these courses are designed to guide you through your work as a data scientist at a hypothetical streaming media company.
Throughout this specialization, the focus will be on the practice of data science in large, modern enterprises. You will be guided through the use of enterprise-class tools on the IBM Cloud, tools that you will use to create, deploy and test machine learning models. Your favorite open source tools, such a Jupyter notebooks and Python libraries will be used extensively for data preparation and building models. Models will be deployed on the IBM Cloud using IBM Watson tooling that works seamlessly with open source tools. After successfully completing this specialization, you will be ready to take the official IBM certification examination for the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow.
This is the first course of a six part specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
This first course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization introduces you to the scope of the specialization and prerequisites. Specifically, the courses in this specialization are meant for practicing data scientists who are knowledgeable about probability, statistics, linear algebra, and Python tooling for data science and machine learning. A hypothetical streaming media company will be introduced as your new client. You will be introduced to the concept of design thinking, IBMs framework for organizing large enterprise AI projects. You will also be introduced to the basics of scientific thinking, because the quality that distinguishes a seasoned data scientist from a beginner is creative, scientific thinking. Finally you will start your work for the hypothetical media company by understanding the data they have, and by building a data ingestion pipeline using Python and Jupyter notebooks. By the end of this course you should be able to: 1. Know the advantages of carrying out data science using a structured process 2. Describe how the stages of design thinking correspond to the AI enterprise workflow 3. Discuss several strategies used to prioritize business opportunities 4. Explain where data science and data engineering have the most overlap in the AI workflow 5. Explain the purpose of testing in data ingestion 6. Describe the use case for sparse matrices as a target destination for data ingestion 7. Know the initial steps that can be taken towards automation of data ingestion pipelines Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
This is the second course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
In this course you will begin your work for a hypothetical streaming media company by doing exploratory data analysis (EDA). Best practices for data visualization, handling missing data, and hypothesis testing will be introduced to you as part of your work. You will learn techniques of estimation with probability distributions and extending these estimates to apply null hypothesis significance tests. You will apply what you learn through two hands on case studies: data visualization and multiple testing using a simple pipeline. By the end of this course you should be able to: 1. List several best practices concerning EDA and data visualization 2. Create a simple dashboard in Watson Studio 3. Describe strategies for dealing with missing data 4. Explain the difference between imputation and multiple imputation 5. Employ common distributions to answer questions about event probabilities 6. Explain the investigative role of hypothesis testing in EDA 7. Apply several methods for dealing with multiple testing Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed that you have completed Course 1 of the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow specialization and have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
This is the third course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
Course 3 introduces you to the next stage of the workflow for our hypothetical media company. In this stage of work you will learn best practices for feature engineering, handling class imbalances and detecting bias in the data. Class imbalances can seriously affect the validity of your machine learning models, and the mitigation of bias in data is essential to reducing the risk associated with biased models. These topics will be followed by sections on best practices for dimension reduction, outlier detection, and unsupervised learning techniques for finding patterns in your data. The case studies will focus on topic modeling and data visualization. By the end of this course you will be able to: 1. Employ the tools that help address class and class imbalance issues 2. Explain the ethical considerations regarding bias in data 3. Employ ai Fairness 360 open source libraries to detect bias in models 4. Employ dimension reduction techniques for both EDA and transformations stages 5. Describe topic modeling techniques in natural language processing 6. Use topic modeling and visualization to explore text data 7. Employ outlier handling best practices in high dimension data 8. Employ outlier detection algorithms as a quality assurance tool and a modeling tool 9. Employ unsupervised learning techniques using pipelines as part of the AI workflow 10. Employ basic clustering algorithms Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed that you have completed Courses 1 and 2 of the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow specialization and you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
This is the fourth course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
Course 4 covers the next stage of the workflow, setting up models and their associated data pipelines for a hypothetical streaming media company. The first topic covers the complex topic of evaluation metrics, where you will learn best practices for a number of different metrics including regression metrics, classification metrics, and multi-class metrics, which you will use to select the best model for your business challenge. The next topics cover best practices for different types of models including linear models, tree-based models, and neural networks. Out-of-the-box Watson models for natural language understanding and visual recognition will be used. There will be case studies focusing on natural language processing and on image analysis to provide realistic context for the model pipelines. By the end of this course you will be able to: Discuss common regression, classification, and multilabel classification metrics Explain the use of linear and logistic regression in supervised learning applications Describe common strategies for grid searching and cross-validation Employ evaluation metrics to select models for production use Explain the use of tree-based algorithms in supervised learning applications Explain the use of Neural Networks in supervised learning applications Discuss the major variants of neural networks and recent advances Create a neural net model in Tensorflow Create and test an instance of Watson Visual Recognition Create and test an instance of Watson NLU Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed that you have completed Courses 1 through 3 of the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow specialization and you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
This is the fifth course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
This course introduces you to an area that few data scientists are able to experience: Deploying models for use in large enterprises. Apache Spark is a very commonly used framework for running machine learning models. Best practices for using Spark will be covered in this course. Best practices for data manipulation, model training, and model tuning will also be covered. The use case will call for the creation and deployment of a recommender system. The course wraps up with an introduction to model deployment technologies. By the end of this course you will be able to: 1. Use Apache Spark's RDDs, dataframes, and a pipeline 2. Employ spark-submit scripts to interface with Spark environments 3. Explain how collaborative filtering and content-based filtering work 4. Build a data ingestion pipeline using Apache Spark and Apache Spark streaming 5. Analyze hyperparameters in machine learning models on Apache Spark 6. Deploy machine learning algorithms using the Apache Spark machine learning interface 7. Deploy a machine learning model from Watson Studio to Watson Machine Learning Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed that you have completed Courses 1 through 4 of the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow specialization and you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
This is the sixth course in the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow Certification specialization. You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
This course focuses on models in production at a hypothetical streaming media company. There is an introduction to IBM Watson Machine Learning. You will build your own API in a Docker container and learn how to manage containers with Kubernetes. The course also introduces several other tools in the IBM ecosystem designed to help deploy or maintain models in production. The AI workflow is not a linear process so there is some time dedicated to the most important feedback loops in order to promote efficient iteration on the overall workflow. By the end of this course you will be able to: 1. Use Docker to deploy a flask application 2. Deploy a simple UI to integrate the ML model, Watson NLU, and Watson Visual Recognition 3. Discuss basic Kubernetes terminology 4. Deploy a scalable web application on Kubernetes 5. Discuss the different feedback loops in AI workflow 6. Discuss the use of unit testing in the context of model production 7. Use IBM Watson OpenScale to assess bias and performance of production machine learning models. Who should take this course? This course targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this course is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses. What skills should you have? It is assumed that you have completed Courses 1 through 5 of the IBM AI Enterprise Workflow specialization and you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understand sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process.
IBM is the global leader in business transformation through an open hybrid cloud platform and AI, serving clients in more than 170 countries around the world. Today 47 of the Fortune 50 Companies rely on the IBM Cloud to run their business, and IBM Watson enterprise AI is hard at work in more than 30,000 engagements. IBM is also one of the world’s most vital corporate research organizations, with 28 consecutive years of patent leadership. Above all, guided by principles for trust and transparency and support for a more inclusive society, IBM is committed to being a responsible technology innovator and a force for good in the world. For more information about IBM visit: www.ibm.com
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The entire specialization will require 35-40 hours of study. Each of the 6 courses requires 4 to 9 hours of study each.
It is assumed you have a solid understanding of the following topics prior to starting this course: Fundamental understanding of Linear Algebra; Understanding of sampling, probability theory, and probability distributions; Knowledge of descriptive and inferential statistical concepts; General understanding of machine learning techniques and best practices; Practiced understanding of Python and the packages commonly used in data science: NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn; Familiarity with IBM Watson Studio; Familiarity with the design thinking process. If you are unsure, Course 1 includes a Readiness Exam you can take to see if you are prepared.
You are STRONGLY encouraged to complete these courses in order as they are not individual independent courses, but part of a workflow where each course builds on the previous ones.
Sorry, you will not.
By the end of this specialization you will be able to:
1. Build an end to end AI solution.
2. Leverage Design Thinking as a framework to work through the translation of business goals into AI technical implementations.
3. Bring together different capabilities such as Machine Learning, and specialized AI use cases.
4. Leverage Python as the tool of choice for building AI models, while integrating IBM technologies to facilitate enterprise tasks such as cross-collaboration for the creation of machine learning models, employing out-of-the-box trained models for natural language processing and visual recognition, and deploying models to production.
This specialization targets existing data science practitioners that have expertise building machine learning models, who want to deepen their skills on building and deploying AI in large enterprises. If you are an aspiring Data Scientist, this specialization is NOT for you as you need real world expertise to benefit from the content of these courses.
No. The certification exam is administered by Pearson VUE and must be taken at one of their testing facilities. You may visit their site at https://home.pearsonvue.com/ibm for more information. For a direct link to the exam information click here: https://ibm.biz/ai-workflow-cert.
For a direct link to the exam information click here: https://ibm.biz/ai-workflow-cert.
It is highly recommended that you have at least a basic working knowledge of design thinking and Watson Studio prior to taking this course. Please visit the IBM Skills Gateway at http://ibm.com/training/badges and "Find a Badge" related to "design thinking" or "Watson Studio". From there you will be directed to courses covering these topics.
No. Most of the exercises may be completed with open source tools running on your personal computer. However, the exercises are designed with an enterprise focus and are intended to be run in an enterprise environment that allows for easier sharing and collaboration. Some of the exercises in this specialization are heavily focused on deployment and testing of machine learning models and use the IBM Watson tooling found on the IBM Cloud.
Yes. All IBM Cloud Data and AI services are based upon open source technologies.
The exercises in the course may be completed by anyone using the IBM Cloud "Lite" plan, which is free for use.
1. Python version 3, including libraries for data analytics, visualization and machine learning.
2. The Jupyter notebook libraries for Python version 3.
3. Access to the IBM Cloud at https://cloud.ibm.com and the Watson services on the IBM Cloud.
This course is completely online, so there’s no need to show up to a classroom in person. You can access your lectures, readings and assignments anytime and anywhere via the web or your mobile device.
If you subscribed, you get a 7-day free trial during which you can cancel at no penalty. After that, we don’t give refunds, but you can cancel your subscription at any time. See our full refund policy.
Yes! To get started, click the course card that interests you and enroll. You can enroll and complete the course to earn a shareable certificate, or you can audit it to view the course materials for free. When you subscribe to a course that is part of a Specialization, you’re automatically subscribed to the full Specialization. Visit your learner dashboard to track your progress.
Yes. In select learning programs, you can apply for financial aid or a scholarship if you can’t afford the enrollment fee. If fin aid or scholarship is available for your learning program selection, you’ll find a link to apply on the description page.
When you enroll in the course, you get access to all of the courses in the Specialization, and you earn a certificate when you complete the work. If you only want to read and view the course content, you can audit the course for free. If you cannot afford the fee, you can apply for financial aid.
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