Finland’s New Free AI Courses
By: Frederik Bussler
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Learning, Data Science, Education

Finland’s New Free AI Courses

How to get a certificate and take advantage of the course by Elements AI.

Photo by Arttu Päivinen on Unsplash

Besides being the home of Santa Claus, Finland is known as a tech leader, even ahead of the US, according to the UNDP. Indeed, tech operations constitute “over 50% of all Finnish exports.”

We even owe technologies like Linux and the first web browser to Finland. Today, Finland is keeping up its tech legacy with its free Elements of AI online course.

Overview

Elements of AI is a set of two online courses made by Reaktor and the University of Helsinki, combining theory and practice with teaching as many people as possible about AI. The two courses are titled Introduction to AI and Building AI .

The course is well on its way to achieving its mission of making AI accessible, as over 550,000 people have already signed up, as of writing.

Introduction to AI

The first course is split into six chapters:

What is AI?

AI problem solving

Real-world AI

Machine learning

Neural networks

Implications

Screenshot of “Elements of AI” course progress section, captured by the author.

The course is very well designed, with simple explanations, nice visualizations, and exercises at the bottom of most chapters to solidify your learning.

Both courses feature a “Course Progress” ribbon to show you how you’re progressing through the course and to keep you motivated.

Building AI

The second section will take around 50 hours and is split into five chapters:

Getting started with AI

Dealing with uncertainty

Machine learning

Neural networks

Conclusion

This time, the exercises are more in-depth and practical, so they’ll be more challenging than before. Be sure to check out the community below if you get stuck.

Community

Elements of AI come with an awesome, highly active community at Spectrum, where you can discuss and ask questions about each chapter.

As of writing, the community has almost 8,000 members with whom you can ask questions and study. I’ve found it’s an invaluable resource to make sure I truly understand the material. Best of all, it’s free!

Certificate

You can purchase a certificate, upon completion, for each course, for just 50 Euros. This will be a shareable certificate that would make a great addition to any CV or LinkedIn, although it’s totally optional, and the course is normally free.

The Final Project

For the final project, you’re expected to demonstrate your skills and creativity. While it’s not required, it’s a great opportunity to put your skills to practice and share with a community of thousands of other learners.

Elements of AI gives a lot of inspiration and ideas for final projects, such as “Sources Checker” — a bot that checks the sources of news articles online.

Other ideas include noise pollution forecasting, predicting stock criteria like growth and reliability, matching ideas and doers, automating applications to relevant jobs, making expert recommendations, assessing financial risk, recommending healthy meals, and many more.

Perhaps my favorite idea is the “AI credit-risk management for social lending” project, which uses AI to predict credit risk. Models like these are already being used in the real world.

For instance, the micro-loan company Creditt uses Obviously.AI’s API to score customer profiles and find out how much to credit users.