Hi there,
I’m Mads. My specialization is political science, risk and security management which i did as a M.Sc. I’m a non-technical person but want to add A.I. to my portfolio. It interests me above all and it is an essential skill. I appreciate any tips for certification and career paths that I can choose to expand on my existing experience. Thanks a million!
Hi, Mads.
Welcome to the DeepLearning.AI forums!
To give advice it would help to know more about what your goals are. E.g. is the goal to understand how AI might be applied in the fields you mentioned (political science, risk management and security)? One place to start would be the AI For Everyone Specialization here. That is intended for a wide audience including people from “non-technical” backgrounds. It introduces the concepts of AI/ML/DL and discusses the types of problems to which you can apply those techniques, but doesn’t really address how to build those solutions. The other thing to note is that AI4E is maybe 3 years old at this point and a lot has changed in the last 3 years with the rapid development and deployment of LLMs. The other thing you could do after AI4E would be take a look at the list of “short courses” that discuss various aspects of LLMs and see if any of those sound applicable to your interests.
Once you get beyond that level, then we need to talk more about what you mean by “non-technical”. Have you ever done any programming? How much math do you know? If you want to go beyond the above and start taking any of the courses about how to actually build ML/AI systems, then you need a solid base level of competence in python programming and math. The math you need is what you’d get in the United States in what we call “high school” or what you probably call “secondary school” if you are in Europe. But it would need to be the type of secondary school curriculum that is targeted to students bound for university. You need algebra, analytic geometry and linear algebra at least to the level of understanding vectors, matrices and how matrix multiply works.
Here’s a recent answer from Tom Mosher that describes the programming and math requirements and then the path to take through the main courses here if you want to take the approach of learning how to actually build ML systems.
Regards,
Paul
Thank you so much for this. I’ve done the AI4E and GA.I4E just to get an idea. My ambition is not to develop A.I. or get into coding professionally (although I would want to know some about it for general knowledge). I have seen A I. Product Management as a professional career option. For the Physical security role I have now, zeroing in on A.I. solutions to reduce manpower would be interesting but also threats posed by A.I in this terrain. This is my current role but I’ve done a wide scope of different roles, which I will not all list here though, and I’m not limited to security per se.
I’ll check out the short courses on the topics.