In short

In parallel with my Master's final internship, I am currently taking a 6 month Udacity nanodegree on Artificial Intelligence. Recently, I have been fascinated by this field and the countless possibilites it offers. When Udacity announced this nanodegree, I jumped on the occasion, and got selected to be part of the first cohort of 500 students starting in January 2016. As I stated in the cover letter I joined to my application, I would really like to take AI techniques, apply them to something related to Sustainable Development, a domain usually left out because it is not the most profitable, and see what good can come from it!

The first term of the nanodegree covers the core principles of AI such as search, optimization, logic, planning, and probability. It seems strongly based on Peter Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", which is an excellent textbook I have and use as a reference when needed. There is not much theory I am not already familiar with in this first trimester, but a great feature of Udacity nanodegrees is the projects designed by their teaching staff. I will be posting about them below when the time comes.

For the second term, I will have to choose one of three concentrations: Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, and Speech Recognition. I am completely indecisive because I am interested in every single one so I might end up taking all three of them over 9 months instead of 3. Help me: what should I start with?