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.

Machine learning is the predictive heart of big data analytics, and one of the key skills that separates data scientists from mere analysts. But getting started with machine learning can be a challenge. Here are a few ways beginners can get off the ground with their machine learning adventure. Machine learning is a vast field with many different specialties, so it's quite easy for a beginner to get overwhelmed. For instance, one specialty called deep learning powers many of today's artificial intelligence breakthroughs.

Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. That's why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments. New posts will be published here first, and previous posts are archived on the Udacity blog.

Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don't think AI will transform in the next several years.

Mike Salem from Udacity's Robotics Nanodegree is hosting a series of interviews with professional roboticists as part of their free online material. Nick is a former robotics postdoc at Stanford and received his PhD in Control Systems from UC Berkeley. At Dash Robotics, Nick handles team-building and project management. You can find all the interviews here. We'll be posting one per week on Robohub.

In this article, ten questions about MOOCs (crowdsourced from the recipients of the AAAI and SIGCSE mailing lists) were posed by editors Michael Wollowski, Todd Neller, James Boerkoel to Douglas H. Fisher, Charles Isbell Jr., and Michael Littman — educators with unique, relevant experiences to lend their perspective on those issues.

In fall 2014, we launched a foundational course in artificial intelligence (CS7637: Knowledge-Based AI) as part of the Georgia Institute of Technology's Online Master of Science in Computer Science program. We incorporated principles and practices from the cognitive and learning sciences into the development of the online AI course. We also integrated AI techniques into the instruction of the course, including embedding 100 highly focused intelligent tutoring agents in the video lessons. By now, more than 2000 students have taken the course. Evaluations have indicated that OMSCS students enjoy the course compared to traditional courses, and more importantly, that online students have matched residential students' performance on the same assessments. In this article, we present the design, delivery, and evaluation of the course, focusing on the use of AI for teaching AI. We also discuss lessons we learned for scaling the teaching and learning of AI.

Additional landmark events in the past 20 or so years that looked at the challenges of AI education have included the AI Education Workshop held at the 2008 AAAI conference and the Improving Instruction of Introductory Artificial Intelligence symposium held at the 1994 AAAI Fall Symposium. To quote Marti Hearst, the organizer of the 1994 symposium (Hearst 1994): "This symposium was motivated by the desire to address an oft-voiced complaint that introductory artificial intelligence is a notoriously difficult course to teach well." With the regular progression of the field and recent successes such as autonomous cars, deep learning, and IBM's Watson system, this situation has not become easier. At the same time, recent innovations in pedagogical technologies, such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), smartphones, and smart classrooms, have revolutionized how we view the art of teaching. We believe that now is a good time to take stock of state-of-the-art practices in the teaching of AI, as well as propose a vision for AI education in the future. This issue of AI Magazine includes five articles at the cutting edge of AI education. Each covers a subject of current concern to the AI education community. We note that the subject area expertise of the authors covers a wide range including robotics, knowledge-based systems, ethics, machine learning, and game theory. The article Ask Me Anything About MOOCs by Douglas Fisher, Charles Isbell, and Michael Littman was a unique project.

The Robot Academy is a new learning resource from Professor Peter Corke and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the team behind the award-winning Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. There are over 200 lessons available, all for free. The lessons were created in 2015 for the Introduction to Robotics and Robotic Vision courses. We describe our approach to creating the original courses in the article, An Innovative Educational Change: Massive Open Online Courses in Robotics and Robotic Vision. The courses were designed for university undergraduate students but many lessons are suitable for anybody, as you can easily see the difficulty rating for each lesson.

Recitations from Tel-Aviv University introductory course to computer science, assembled as IPython notebooks by Yoav Ram. Exploratory Computing with Python, a set of 15 Notebooks that cover exploratory computing, data analysis, and visualization. No prior programming knowledge required. Each Notebook includes a number of exercises (with answers) that should take less than 4 hours to complete. Developed by Mark Bakker for undergraduate engineering students at the Delft University of Technology.