Story of Udacity Scholarship Challenge Recipient…
Well, it was the start of summer and the end of the second year of college -which meant it was time to get serious and focus on, my career and get serious to make this summer the most productive one ever.
As soon as I joined my college I realised pretty soon that Data Science is the field that interests me. I was always amazed at seeing computer learning new things without human intervention. Soon I realised it was more than that. I realised the majority of the world’s data is unclean, so first I needed to clean the data to apply the machine learning or deep learning models. I soon learnt Data Preprocessing, Machine Learning and was working on this project. My next step was Deep Learning and suddenly I came across this scholarship as if this scholarship challenge was made for me. From my experience, Udacity Nanodegree is one of the best platforms to boost your knowledge. Well, I decided to apply for this scholarship and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
My joy knew no bounds when the results of the challenge were announced. I was in Singapore for a vacation when the results were announced. Immediately I left everything and joined the slack community. I was new to the slack community and was so overwhelmed at that time.
Fast forward to today it has been more than 2 months since the start of the challenge. There is so much I have achieved during this course of two months and there is such a long way to go.
The Slack Community
This community that I am a part of is one of the best community that I have ever been a part of. If I have a doubt, I reach out to the community. If I need some career advice, I reach out to this community. If I am feeling demotivated the community is always there to keep me motivated. Besides that, there are awesome initiatives like Study Group,60 Days of Udacity.
60 Days of Udacity take my consistency to the next level. People generally make streaks on Snapchat and here I am making study streaks. No matter how much busy the schedule is I am trying my best to maintain that streak.
Well, one of the community initiatives was also this blogging initiative and it is the first time that I am writing a blog so thanks to this community for that.
Introduction to Deep Learning:
So this course started with Introduction of PyTorch. I was completely new to PyTorch so I also studied “Intro to Deep Learning with PyTorch” — a free course offered by Udacity.
After that, I started with the first lesson of this course and was introduced to a single layer, multi-layer neural network.
I learnt about many things like training my first deep learning model, working with GPU and transfer learning.
Introduction to Differential Privacy:
Every model requires data and there is a lot of data that contains sensitive information. Anonymization of Data is one way to go to protect Privacy but it was found out that Data can be easily deanonymized. So we need something that we cannot reverse engineer.
So we use Differential Privacy. Differential Privacy works like this -We add noise to our basic ground truth model. So what is the point of a model that adds noise?
Differential Privacy strikes a balance between utility and privacy. As there is only little deviation from the original model and privacy.is also maintained.
Introduction to Federated Learning:
Federated Learning is a nice concept in which the model is downloaded and trained on our device rather than on another server/device where our data can be at risk.
Only devices that meet the requirements i.e on which battery doesn’t drain so fast or processor is good are eligible for federated learning.
Conclusion:
It is one of the best journey that I have been a part of. I learnt a lot of things and of course, there is a ling way to go.
Differential Privacy and Federated Learning are nice topics and I will keep on exploring them.
I would like to conclude by thanking Udacity and Facebook for giving me such opportunity to learn and grow.
Happy Learning. Stay Udacious.
