Breaking Into AI

Stories about starting a career in AI and deep learning from members of the global AI community | Inspiration and ideas for how you can break into AI

Five Important AI Programming Languages

March 23rd, 2023 | Breaking Into AI

Coding is a must-have skill for anyone building AI products. It enables you to bring your machine learning ideas to life. Learning to code is fun and empowering, but it also requires time and effort....

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Lorenzo Ostano is a machine learning engineer based in Milan, Italy.

Breaking Into AI: How a Machine Learning Engineer Turns Ideas Into Products

June 17th, 2022 | Breaking Into AI

Lorenzo Ostano first encountered machine learning and data science as a business analyst shortly after graduating from college. He dove into learning, and soon landed work as a machine learning engineer. After working several years for a variety of consulting companies, he recently took a job as a software engineer. He spoke to us about why he believes traditional computing skills are important to deploying enterprise machine learning applications.

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How Deep Learning Helped an IT Manager Find New Career Satisfaction After Age 40

December 23rd, 2021 | Breaking Into AI

Olivier Moulin is an IT manager for a large, multi-national medical technology company who has been working in technology for over 20 years. Early in his career, he made a tough decision to take a high paying job instead of pursuing a Ph.D. He spoke with us about how the Deep Learning Specialization helped him build the confidence to go back

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How a New Mother Learned AI During Her Newborn Baby’s Naps

December 23rd, 2021 | Breaking Into AI

Apala Guha is a senior machine learning compiler engineer at Lightmatter, a Boston-area startup. Before that, she was a computer scientist who had always been interested in deep learning. When she quit her previous job at the beginning of 2020 to have a baby, she took advantage of the “time off” to take the Specialization.

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How a Mathematician Found Career Satisfaction With Deep Learning

December 23rd, 2021 | Breaking Into AI

Aleksandr Gontcharov is a software engineer at Microsoft. Early in his career, he moved from job to job, but none of them ever felt right. The Deep Learning Specialization helped him find his calling; he was hired for a machine learning role while still taking the courses. He spoke with us about why the Specialization was the spark that put his career in motion. 

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How an Astrophysicist Decided that Deep Learning Was His True Calling

December 23rd, 2021 | Breaking Into AI

Luciano Darriba is an AI developer living in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his former life, he was an astrophysicist. This wasn’t fulfilling him, so he took the Deep Learning Specialization in hopes of kickstarting a new trajectory. Less than a year later, he had a new job working at Baufest, a software services company.

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Breaking Into AI: Juggling Work, Projects, and Personal Life With Kennedy Wangari

September 14th, 2020 | Breaking Into AI

Kennedy Kamande Wangari got his first taste of AI just two years ago in Kenya. Since then, he has been sprinting towards a top-tier career by taking numerous online courses, working entry-level jobs, volunteering to grow his local AI community, and considering a startup. Next step: Earning a graduate degree. Kennedy shares lessons he learned from starting out at a breakneck pace and explains how he balances professional obligations with personal life.

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Breaking into AI: Marrying Web Performance with Machine Learning

November 19th, 2019 | Breaking Into AI

Nitin pushed the limits of his software engineering skills to build important products, but he knew he needed to learn more. After taking the Deep Learning Specialization, he specifically applied to jobs that would allow him to transition from web performance to machine learning engineer.

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Deep Learner Spotlight: Christine Payne

November 1st, 2018 | Breaking Into AI

Introduce yourself: What’s your background? Did you have a technical role prior to enrolling in the course? Throughout my life I’ve juggled my love of both science and music. I was a physics major in...

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Deep Learner Spotlight: Wolfgang Reuter

October 26th, 2018 | Breaking Into AI

Introduce yourself: What’s your background? I am a Senior AI Strategist in the applied AI initiative at Unternehmertum, a German start-up incubator and innovation consultancy. I also work freelance as an AI programmer. These jobs...

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Deep Learner Spotlight: Jan Zawadzki

September 25th, 2018 | Breaking Into AI

Introduce yourself: What’s your background? Did you have a technical role prior to enrolling in the course? My background is split between a traditional business education and a computer science education. I studied Business Administration...

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Deep Learner Spotlight: Chris Morrow

September 25th, 2018 | Breaking Into AI

Introduce yourself: What’s your background? Did you have a technical role prior to enrolling in the course? I do not have a technical background. I spent about eight years as an Army Officer, leading small...

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