Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. When Timnit Gebru attended a prestigious AI research conference last year, she counted 6 black people in the audience out of an estimated 8,500. As a PhD candidate at Stanford University who has published a number of notable papers in the field of artificial intelligence, Gebru finds the lack of diversity in the industry to be "extremely alarming" and effectively an "international emergency."

About this course: This 1-week accelerated on-demand course introduces participants to the Big Data and Machine Learning capabilities of Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It provides a quick overview of the Google Cloud Platform and a deeper dive of the data processing capabilities. At the end of this course, participants will be able to: • Identify the purpose and value of the key Big Data and Machine Learning products in the Google Cloud Platform • Use CloudSQL and Cloud Dataproc to migrate existing MySQL and Hadoop/Pig/Spark/Hive workloads to Google Cloud Platform • Employ BigQuery and Cloud Datalab to carry out interactive data analysis • Choose between Cloud SQL, BigTable and Datastore • Train and use a neural network using TensorFlow • Choose between different data processing products on the Google Cloud Platform Before enrolling in this course, participants should have roughly one (1) year of experience with one or more of the following: • A common query language such as SQL • Extract, transform, load activities • Data modeling • Machine learning and/or statistics • Programming in Python Google Account Notes: • You'll need a Google/Gmail account and a credit card or bank account to sign up for the Google Cloud Platform free trial (Google is currently blocked in China).

According to IBM, the world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. A decent chunk of those quintillion bytes is made up of people asking the experts how to break into and excel in the dynamic, lucrative field of data science. An even larger chunk of those bytes consists of convoluted, contradicting answers to that question. This is, on one hand, a great thing. Multiple prominent data science innovators are out there giving you free advice on your most pressing questions, backed up by years of their experience and training.

There's no doubt about it - Data Science is big news right now. We see it on the news every day, the increasing number of news stories about Big Data, the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, smart cars, smart cities, smart politicians. OK, maybe I went a bit too far with that last one... Every month I get an email from Udemy telling me which courses are their best sellers. The list isn't about Data Science, but there are always plenty of Data Science courses right up there at the top of the list. We decided to share this resource with you, and so here are Udemy's top selling courses.

Remember, just because you get the algorithm to run doesn't mean the result isn't nonsense. If you're new to all of this, then the Machine Learning Foundations course on Coursera is a good place to start -- despite the creepy floating half-professor.

When I was writing books on networking and programming topics in the early 2000s, the web was a good, but an incomplete resource. Blogging had started to take off, but YouTube wasn't around yet, nor was Quora, Twitter, or podcasts. Over ten years later as I've been diving into AI and machine learning, it is a completely different ballgame. There are so many resources -- it's difficult to know where to start (and stop)! To save you some of the effort I went through in researching all the different nooks and crannies of the web to find the best content; I've organized them into a big collection here.

The University of Agder invites applications for a full-time permanent position as Professor at the Department of Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Science. The position is currently located in Grimstad, Norway. The starting date is negotiable. The primary aim of this position is to strengthen the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR), to be hosted by the Department of ICT. The vision of CAIR is to provide an attractive environment for cutting-edge research on artificial intelligence (AI), focusing particularly on machine learning.

Predictions for the potential of artificial intelligence wax poetic -- solutions from climate change to curing disease -- but the everyday applications make it seem far more mundane, like a glorified clock radio. Thankfully, the future may be closer than we think. And the miraculous feats are not happening in Silicon Valley X-Labs -- in a plot twist, nonprofits are leading the charge in creating human-centered applications of the hottest AI technologies. From the simplest automated communications to contextual learnings based on analysis of deep data, these technologies have the potential to rapidly scale and improve the lives of our most underserved communities. Take chatbots for example, a new spin on mobile messaging that has historically been human-powered.

We all know the importance of code. It's the backbone of computing, the internet and so much else we come into contact with on a daily basis. But learning to code is still a tricky and poorly defined pursuit. I've booted up Codecademy a few times, only to try a couple of courses and realise I have no idea what I'm doing. For people like me -- of which I suspect there are many -- what's the next step?

We all remember Maxim Gorky, Rabindranath Tagore, Ernest Hemingway, James Watt, Thomas Alva Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Wright Brothers as some of the few people who left their mark in the world but do you also know that all of them were partially or wholly self-taught. They did not rely completely on the education that school had to offer. These kinds of people are called autodidacts. Here is a list of such people, try and see how many you already know. It was very beautifully penned down by the American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, Mark Twain as "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."