Samsung Electronics launches the second free online course addressing AI in Natural Language Processing on the Stepik educational platform

Samsung Electronics has successfully launched a massive open online course «Neural Networks and Text Analysis» on the educational platform Stepik.org. This is the second free online course in a series, devoted to the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The course was developed by experts from Samsung Research Russia: Samsung R&D Institute Russia and Samsung AI Center - Moscow.

The «Neural Networks and Text Analysis» course debuted on October 15 is already being used by over 3000 students for personal training. The training program is designed for IT students and lasts 7 weeks (3-5 hours per week of workload as projected). The online course consists of more than a hundred short video lectures, accompanied by notes, practical tasks and extensive links to additional resources for further self-development. The course ends with a serious practical task that will give students a feel of what it’s like to be a machine learning natural language processing (NLP) specialist. Graduates of the course receive a certificate issued both by Samsung and Stepik.

Authors of this new course, Roman Suvorov, Anastasia Yanina and Alexei Silvestrov, are all researchers at the SAIC-Moscow, experts in machine learning, and eager to share both their vision of the current state of discipline and their practical experience, which extends to such current tasks such as text classification, named entities recognition, sentiment analysis, text generation, and transfer learning on language models. These technologies are at the heart of many of the applications we use today: Internet search, machine translation, voice assistants, etc.

Admission requirements for students include a firm knowledge of higher mathematics at university level and some knowledge in Python programming, as well as familiarity with the basics of machine learning and neural networks. In the development of the course, the authors took as prerequisite the level of knowledge that can be attained at the end of Samsung’s first online course on the Stepik platform — «Neural networks and computer vision«. That course, launched in June, earlier this year, has already received a Stepik Award as the best course from new authors and has a stable popularity, gaining new students, the total number of which has lately reached 19,500.

«Eliminating shortages and training new talents in artificial intelligence is one of the most pressing challenges for the modern IT industry in the world. Recently, Russia adopted a national strategy for the development of artificial intelligence. Our free online courses provide Russian-speaking audiences with equal access to the latest knowledge in high-tech applications. In addition, the best graduates of our courses get the opportunity to prove themselves by being interviewed in the Samsung Research Russia division. I invite interested professionals to join our thousands of students and I wish you to achieve your career success!» commented Jin Wook Lee, CEO of Samsung Research Russia.

Samsung Electronics CIS headquarters in cooperation with Samsung Research Russia is implementing several federal social and educational programs, chief among them are «Samsung IT School» (since 2014) and «Samsung IT Academy» (from 2017). Since 2019, students of the Moscow State University and the Southern Federal University are participating to a new educational track on artificial intelligence as a part of the Samsung IT Academy.

In addition, Samsung Research Russia is constantly undertaking new initiatives in the field of artificial intelligence, such as the summer school on machine learning “Samsung AI Bootcamp”, the «NLP and Deep Learning» course at Moscow State University, the “Deep Bayes School” for experts in data analysis with invited international speakers. In 2019, SRR won one of Russia’s most prestigious HR Management Competitions, the “HR-Brand Award 2018”.

Link to course: https://stepik.org/course/54098/promo