CS Online Weekly Updates

 This week I completed the module 6 and a lot of the module 7 portion of the google data analytics certificate. Learning more about data collection, transformation, SQL, visualizations and python.  My plan for next week is to finish the 8th and 9th modules and be done with the certificate. Then I can start working on my last project for that certificate and my final capstone.  No challenges in the certification process, still needing to find a time for the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam. No instructor assistance needed, but I have a few questions I will email Dr. Tao about. 

This week I made a ton of progress on the Google Data Analytics Course. I completed 3 of the 9 course modules and learned a lot from spreadsheet data analysis and manipulation, to SQL Queries and manipulations.  My plan for next week is to get more courses done. Around 2-3 hopefully.  No challenges, still have to just find a time and place to do the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification Exam.

This week I started my last certificate, the Google data analytics. I am excited to get  started and continue it.  My plan for next week is to continue it as well, try to get about a fourth to halfway done to keep me on pace to finish soon.  No challenges besides not scheduling my AWS exam due to current situations. Hopefully I can resolve that somehow.

 This week was continuing the fast ai part 2 course and learning much more. This half is where things got more serious and I learned how to train models faster and more reliably (accelerated SGD tricks, ResNets, dropout, mixed precision), and then I went deep on diffusion and learned better sampling methods with ideas from Karras. I also learned practical applications like super-resolution. To wrap it up, I studied attention/transformers and how all these pieces come together in latent diffusion which is the efficient trick that makes modern text-to-image systems possible.

 This week I created the project showing my completion of part 1 of the Fast.ai course. The files can be found on my GitHub at  https://github.com/aleczambie/fastai-nba-cert-portfolio   Along with that, I started part 2 of the certification and I went from “using deep learning” to actually understanding what’s going on under the hood. I started with stable diffusion and practicing it, then dove into the fundamentals that make all of this work like matrix multiplication and tensors, and building and training an MLP.  From there I built up to autoencoders and the Learner/callback mindset, and learned why doing stuff like initialization and normalization can make the difference between training that works and training that doesn't work. 

This week, I accomplished finishing the Google Agile Essentials certificate, along with starting the last certificate I have, the Google data analytics certificate. My plan for next week is to get as much of this Google certificate done, and hopefully start the project for the certificate after it.  Currently, I do not have too many challenges, except for that I still need to schedule the Amazon Cloud Practitioner exam but it is hard to do that in the middle east given the current state of the country. I do not need instructor assistance, but I have alerted them of my situation.