The idea of gaining a Professional Certificate is to demonstrate your possession of skills needed to succeed in today's most in-demand fields. News of 30% off edX Professional Certificates prompted us to take a look at what's on offer if you want to acquire skills in AI and Data Science. The two that stood out are both from Harvard University. 

Save up to 30% off these programs until October 28, 2024. Use code EDXSUCCESS24.

Disclosure: When you make a purchase having followed a link to a course provider from this article, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Our first choice is the Computer Science for Artificial Intelligence Professional Certificate, a two-course program that we've reported on before.It is considered an ideal first step towards thinking algorithmically and understanding programming fundamentals together with the foundations of modern artificial intelligence then using Python to learn.

The first course is CS50x: Introduction to Computer Science, the online version of most popular undergraduate course at Harvard. This is a 12-week course at 6–18 hours per week in which you are introduced to the common programming languages. To know about its content see our report Computer Science For Beginners With Harvard's CS50x.

You then build on that foundation with CS50's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python.

This is a 7-week course at 10–30  hours per week that explores the concepts and algorithms at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, diving into the ideas that give rise to technologies like game-playing engines, handwriting recognition, and machine translation. Through hands-on projects, students gain exposure to the theory behind graph search algorithms, classification, optimization, machine learning, large language models, and other topics in artificial intelligence as they incorporate them into their own Python programs. By course’s end, students emerge with experience in libraries for machine learning as well as knowledge of artificial intelligence principles that enable them to design intelligent systems of their own.

For more information see Take Harvard's CS50 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python in which Nikos Vagallis concludes:

All in all, this is a very satisfying course. It manages to blend theory and practice excellently and exposes the student to Python's data science environment that the language is so famous for. Totally recommended. 

Demand for those with skills in Data Science continues to be high and the Professional Certificate in Data Science taught by Rafael Irizarry, Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard University is for anyone with a basic understanding of probability theory. It comprises nine courses and is estimated to take 1 year 5 months at 2-3 hours per week. However it is self-paced and so some students will complete it in a much shorter time. 

The first seven courses all last 8 weeks at 1-2 hours per week. They are:

• R Basics: Build a foundation in R and learn how to wrangle, analyze, and visualize data.
• Visualization: Learn basic data visualization principles and how to apply them using ggplot2.
• Probability: Learn probability theory using a case study on the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
• Inference and Modeling: Using R and a motivating case study on election forecasting.
• Productivity Tools: Keep your projects organized and produce reproducible reports using GitHub, git, Unix/Linux, and RStudio.
• Wrangling: Learn to process and convert raw data into formats needed for analysis.
• Learn how to use R to implement linear regression, one of the most common statistical modeling approaches in data science.

The eighth course lasts 8 weeks at 2-4 hours per week and is:

• Machine Learning: Learn popular machine learning algorithms, principal component analysis, and regularization by building a movie recommendation system. Learn about training data, and how to use a set of data to discover potentially predictive relationships. As you build the movie recommendation system, you will learn how to train algorithms using training data so you can predict the outcome for future datasets. You will also learn about overtraining and techniques to avoid it such as cross-validation. 

The final component is estimated to take 2 weeks at 15 to 30 hours per week. It is a Capstone project in which students get an opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills in R data analysis they have gained throughout the series. This final project tests your skills in data visualization, probability, inference and modeling, data wrangling, data organization, regression, and machine learning. 

While you audit all the other courses for free you can only do the Capstone and earn a professional certificate if you have paid for the series. To save 30% on its normal price enrol before October 28th and quote the code EDXSUCCESS24 at checkout.

More Information

Computer Science for Artificial Intelligence Professional Certificate

CS50's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python

Related Articles

Take Harvard's CS50 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python

Computer Science For Beginners With Harvard's CS50x

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Brand New Data Science Courses on edX

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