Deep learning is a growing field that has been increasingly popular in recent years as advances in artificial intelligence are made and the excitement to innovate grows. This spring, MIT will be launching a deep learning course that will take place in San Jose, California, making this the first MIT course ever taught on the West Coast.
The course, Designing Efficient Deep Learning Systems, will be taught by Vivienne Sze, an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT and an expert in AI. The course will part of a Machine Learning Certificate program that MIT will launch in 2018. Other courses in the program include Modeling and Optimization for Machine Learning and Applications, and Machine Learning for Big Data and Text Processing.
According to Sze, the course will focus on designing deep learning systems that are efficient and low-powered. An inefficiently designed system could consume a lot of power, which makes it impractical to use on portable devices such as a cell phone. “The goal is to make the students or audience aware of the interaction between the algorithms and the hardware,” said Sze.
The course will focus on both academics and industry professionals working with deep learning. “We’ve run the course previously in more of an academic setting, but I think a lot of this technology is really translating into industry and people really want to use it,” said Sze. “If you actually want to use it and deploy it you should understand how to make it efficient.”
Sze hopes that this course will teach people not only how to design efficient deep learning systems, but also how to evaluate existing solutions.
