AI/Machine Learning

Career Track
Syllabus & Course Overview

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Introduction
The mainstream adoption of AI-powered products coupled with ever-bigger bets by tech
and tech-adjacent companies has led to an AI talent shortage that many experts predict
won't be alleviated for years. The global machine learning (ML) market is estimated to
grow from $1.4 billion in 2017 to $8.8 billion by 2022. (Source Research and Markets).
AI is projected to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020. (Source: Gartner). From 2015 -18, the
number of AI-related job postings on Indeed increased by 119 percent. (Source: Indeed)

All of that is driving pay sky high. Machine learning engineers earn an average salary of
INR 9,00,000. Mid-service professionals earn average salary of INR 18,00,000 and
goes as high as INR 27,00,000. (Source: Payscale)

At Springboard, we’re focused on filling the gaps in the current job market and helping
people around the world achieve their career goals through accessible, flexible, lifelong
learning. The AI / Machine Learning Career Track is an intensive bootcamp that will
equip you to transition into a role as a machine learning engineer.

Our curriculum is rigorous and deeply technical, teaching you the foundations of
machine learning and deep learning. But it’s also hands-on. We don’t just teach you ML,
we let you do ML. Of the 400 hours of work we estimate it will take to complete this
course, 100 hours go toward projects. You’ll build and deploy large-scale AI systems
with 1:1 mentoring by an industry expert in machine learning.

We are so confident this program can launch you into a AI/Machine

Learning career track that we will refund your tuition fee if you don’t find a
job within 6 months of graduating!

Springboard in numbers

10000+ 300+ 77+

+
All-time Mentors Countries our
students students call
home

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 Prerequisites

You must hold a bachelor’s degree in engineering from an accredited institution. The
AI/Machine Learning Career Track is an advanced course for people who have
strong software engineering skills and industry experience and who want to become
machine learning engineers. You should have atleast foundational knowledge of
probability & statistics.

Admission Process

1. Submit your application

Fill out our application form to get started. There is no application
fee. It takes about 5 - 7 minutes. You should expect a reply from
the admission counsellor within 1-2 business days.

2. Pass the challenge

If it's a fit, we'll send you a challenge to test your statistics and
programming knowledge. Applicants spend up to 2 hours on the
challenge.

3. Reserve your spot

If you pass the challenge, we will send you a registration link. You
will need to pay INR 25,000 to confirm your spot in the cohort and
choose the payment plan for the balance payment. No cost EMI
option available.

4. Join the program

You'll be one of the fewer than 20% of applicants who secured a
spot in the AI/Machine Learning Career Track. Congratulations!

Start application

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How it works

1. Cost and schedule: The course costs INR 1.95L (including taxes)
and runs for 6 months. We also have zero interest EMI plan and
financing options. The course is fully online and allows you to study
anywhere and anytime you want. You’ll have 45 min 1:1 video call
with your mentor every week, and continued access to your
Springboard account and online community after you graduate.

2. Enrollment: Once your application is accepted, we’ll send you a

custom link to make the payment and enroll.

3.Mentor-matching process: Once you enroll, you’ll be asked to fill

out a profile in which you’ll write a short bio about yourself, your
availability during the week, and the skills you want to develop. Your
Student Advisor will use this information to match you with a mentor
who suits your specific needs.

4. Curriculums curated by experts: Diverse perspectives lead to

better learning outcomes. Our 400+ hour expert-curated curriculum is
curated by AI/Machine Learning experts from Dell, Cisco, Hike
Messenger, Gramener, Red Hat and Phone Pe - from the best
sources on the web (tutorials, videos, podcasts, papers, articles, and
some optional books), and updated to reflect new industry trends and
hiring needs.

5. Practice concepts through projects: A lot of your time will be

spent working on hands-on projects and applying what you’re
learning. Working with your mentor, you will get experience with real
business problems and datasets.

6. Career Services: You will get career resources as part of the

curriculum, as well as 1-on-1 video calls with a career coach, where
you will cover resume review, mock interviews and salary negotiation
tips and more

7. Graduating from the course: You will exhibit your AI/Machine

Learning skills through your Capstone Projects which will be approved
by your mentor. Once you complete all assignments, you will receive
a certificate which describes your learning. You can even add this to
your LinkedIn profile!

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Why is mentorship important?

Mentors hold students accountable, help them grow, and impart real-world knowledge
and advice. Research shows that having a mentor makes you 5 times more likely
to get promoted and more likely to get a raise.

Our mentors are experienced professional

Data Scientists and Machine Learning
engineers who are motivated by a desire
to give back to their communities. We
select them based on a combination of
professional experience, educational
background, skills-based competencies,
and a portfolio of work. More importantly,
we look for empathetic individuals with
top-notch communication abilities, and an
intrinsic love of teaching.

Meet our mentors

Our world-class mentors are hand-picked for their experience and love of mentoring

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Syllabus
Each In this 400-hour course, you’ll learn foundations of machine learning and deep
learning — and how to implement them at scale. You’ll go through two in-depth case
studies in natural language processing and image processing and implement a large-
scale application that is ready to deploy to production.

Modules Include:

The Machine Learning Engineering stack

(30 hours)

Throughout this course, you’ll be introduced to a variety of tools and libraries that are
used in the Data Science and Engineering world. These include everything from ML
libraries to deployment tools. There will also be refreshers on best software engineering
practices that every ML Engineer should know.

Topics Covered:

1. The Python Data Science Stack: Pandas, scikit-learn, Keras, TensorFlow, spaCy
2. Data Engineering tools: Spark/PySpark, Containers, Cloud Computing
3. Software engineering: Continuous integration, Github, testing and debugging
4. Data structures and algorithms refresher

Data Wrangling at scale

(40 hours)

No matter what kind of data you’re working with, collecting, cleaning up and managing
that data will be a critical part of your work. In this unit, you’ll learn to collect data at
scale from APIs, real-time systems, and websites. You’ll also learn to transform this
data efficiently and effectively for ML algorithms to crunch down the pipeline.

Topics Covered:

1. Collecting data: APIs, real-time systems, web scraping

2. Cleaning and transforming data for AI systems at scale
3. Working with large data sets in SQL and NoSQL databases
4. Tools such as Pandas, Spark, Dask, SQL, Spark SQL

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Foundations of Machine Learning
(60 hours)

Machine Learning combines aspects of computer science and statistics to extract

useful insights and predictions from data. In this unit, we'll cover the most important
machine learning algorithms (supervised and unsupervised). You'll learn when these
algorithms are useful, the assumptions they incorporate, the tradeoffs they involve and
the various metrics you can use to evaluate how well your algorithm performs. Most
importantly, you’ll learn to implement them at scale.

Topics Covered:

1. Supervised and unsupervised learning

2. Linear and Logistic Regression, Decision Trees and Ensembles
3. Scalable algorithm
4. ms: XGBoost, Catboost
5. Feature engineering and selection, model validation and interpretation
6. Deploying ML models at scale
7. Tools: scikit-learn, SparkML, Auto-ML systems

A deep dive into Deep Learning

(40 hours)

Deep learning is a set of advanced machine learning techniques that powers many of
today’s most cutting edge applications, including image recognition, machine
translation, self-driving cars, speech recognition, and more. It is based on neural
networks, which are loosely inspired by the structure of the human brain. In this unit,
you’ll establish a thorough foundation in deep learning and build real-world applications.

Topics Covered:

1. Overview of Neural Networks, Backpropagation and foundational techniques

2. Principles of Deep Neural Networks
3. Common Deep Neural Network configurations e.g. RNNs, CNNs, MLPs, LSTMs
4. Generative Deep Learning and GANs
5. Engineering Frameworks: Keras, TensorFlow, PyTorch

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AI case study 1: Natural Language Processing
(30 hours)

NLP uses techniques from computer science, linguistics, and machine learning to
process human language, typically in the form of unstructured text. In this unit, you’ll
learn the basics of text data, how to clean and process it, and how to extract insights
from text sources and conversations. We’ll walk you through a detailed case study to
solve a real NLP problem using Deep Learning and other techniques.

Topics Covered:

1. How to work with text and natural language data

2. NLP in Python, using common libraries such as NLTK and spaCy
3. Representing language: BOW, TF-IDF, word embedding models (word2vec,
GloVe, FastText)
4. Deep Learning techniques for NLP
5. Chatbots and other modern NLP applications

AI case study 2: Computer Vision

(30 hours)

Image processing has taken off in the last decade due to the proliferation of images on
social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Recognizing objects such as cars,
and individuals from images is a hard problem, but AI techniques have made huge
strides. In this case study, we’ll go through image processing techniques and solve a
real image processing problem.

Topics Covered:

1. Foundations of computer vision

2. Common challenges in vision
3. Deep learning for images

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Building and deploying large-scale AI systems
(20 hours)

This is the unit where the rubber meets the road. You’ll take everything you have
learned so far: the tools, the techniques, the libraries and learn to incorporate those into
a realistic, large-scale, deployed AI system.

Topics Covered:

1. Common tools and techniques to build large-scale AI applications

2. Docker/Kubernetes and deploying ML applications
3. Real-time data processing using Kafka/Faust
4. Making your application available via an API or a web service

Capstone Project
(100 hours)

The Capstone Project is a mandatory part of our curriculum. This course has one
Capstone Project. Using a combination of tools and techniques that you’ve learned,
you’ll build a realistic, complete, large-scale AI application that’s available to use via an
API, a web service or a optionally, a website.

Work on your Capstone Project will involve the following:

1. Create an ML application from scratch, or take an existing ML prototype

2. Design a large-scale ML system using all the tools and techniques you have
learned
3. Implement the end-to-end ML application on a cloud-based platform, from
collecting data to providing results via an API or a web service

Springboard will provide you free access to a cloud-based engineering environment,

which will support all of the standard tools and libraries.

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Career Support
(30 hours)

Our highly experienced career coaches will help you find your dream MLE job. We’ll
help with creating a highly effective resume showcasing your transferable skills from
your previous roles, as well as your new AI/ML skills and projects. You’ll receive
feedback via mock interviews, both technical as well as behavioral, to prepare for the
interview process. We’ll show you how to effectively get and ace interviews, and
negotiate an above-market salary.

Topics Covered:

1. Job search strategies that top candidates use

2. How to build your network and effectively use it to land interviews
3. Create a high-quality resume, LinkedIn profile and cover letter
4. Interview coaching and practice, including mock interviews for both technical and
non-technical topics
5. Negotiation success tips

Ready for the next step?

Learn more and apply

Questions about Springboard?

Email us at admissions.in@springboard.com with any questions.

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