My name is Dhruv (dhruv@udacity.com) and I lead the Self-Driving Car Nanodegree program here at Udacity. I'm happy to answer questions directly on this note (email me!). I think this program will be very different from our existing Nanodegrees as we have real industry partners who are extremely invested in making sure the program is high quality from the get go. This is because they want to be able to increase their hiring pipelines as soon as possible. We've been determining what projects/content to create by asking our hiring partners (and Sebastian Thrun) what they would want to see in a portfolio of someone they hire. We then work back from there and iterate to create the content. So far, folks at Mercedes-Benz, Otto, NVIDIA, and a few other auto companies have gone over our syllabus, given us feedback, and helped us iterate. I'm trying my hardest to make this program something I would myself take to get into the field or learn more about it(I'm an Engineer by trade who moved into this role!).
In what degree is the material tailored for cars vs other forms of autonomous vehicles? Would you say the knowledge transferable to, for example, autonomous drones?
We had way more demand than we expected so while you may have applied for October, we were only able to get you a spot for November. We're doing this to make sure that you have all the support you need in the program. If we tried to take everyone in the October batch we wouldn't have been able to deliver the quality we wanted as our human support services are not quite ready for that scale yet but will be ready by November. Hope that answers the question!
What percentage of students who complete the program would you expect to be able to get a job as a Self-Driving car engineer?
It's hard for me to give a number for a few reasons:
1. Not everyone applying actually wants a job. A lot of people are taking this program just out of curiosity and interest. 2. It really depends on where you live. People in the Bay Area, Germany, and the Michigan area are going to be closer to employment opportunities than other.
That being said, we are optimizing the entire program to be such that the projects you create are things that employers want. And we've verified this by building the program with employers from the beginning.
The part that I like the most is the parallel effort to build an open source self driving car. My motivation is to build one in my small town in Colombia - with donkeys sharing the road it's going to be very interesting.
If you're going to create a self-driving car, please, please, please get at least a millidegree (~2 hours).
[0] ~120 credit-hours per B.S. degree * ~16 classroom hours per credit-hour * 360 seconds per hour * 10^-9 for nano- prefix
The word "Certificate" comes with a lot of preconceived thoughts. I think they are trying to break away from with a new name
A certificate course by any other name is still a certificate course.
I did read a comment from someone who took it here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12518725
They're very light. Since they don't carry any weight you'd at least hope to learn something. You'll get as much if not more from the free machine learning Georgia tech course with Tom Mitchell's book than the nanodegree. As a follow up, I took Thruns robotic driving course and it suffers from being a purely software course. There are optional hardware projects but no imparted hardware instruction. So I'd be especially leery of an automated driving nanodegree degree online.
There is a lot of PR speak clouding my judgement.
Again this is a totally valid question. I can confirm that Otto will indeed consider someone from this program as we are working with their VP of Engineering, Drew Gray, to actually create this program.
Computer vision (Detect lane lines in a variety of conditions, including changing road surfaces, curved roads, and variable lighting), Neural networks (classify traffic signs, drive a car in a simulator), Track vehicles in camera images using image classifiers such as SVMs, decision trees, HOG, and DNNs.
More projects will cover these topics: Sensor Fusion, Localization, Control, Path Planning, Systems and an Elective.
If you know of comparable ressource to gain experience with all this material please share, I'm not aware of any.
Official source: http://medium.com/self-driving-cars/term-1-in-depth-on-udaci...
I am from India , enrolled for Nov 28 batch.if after paying this hefty amount , if the candidate's geographical location becomes a constraint ,then what's the use? No doubt , i will learn many things , but my ultimate goal is to land a job in Bay Area , Germany etc.I would like that my skills and performance be the criteria in selecting or rejecting me and not the country to which my passport belongs to. The companies should sponsor the visa for the students ideally if he/she is skilled enough and have proven his/her mettle in this NanoDegree program at the end of 9 months.
As a more esoteric bonus I'm evaluating this kind of learning as a potential replacement for higher education for any children I might have, given ever-increasing costs for brick-and-mortar universities.
In the long run my goal is to switch to this area, either as an employee or building a startup.
Maybe nano degrees are all paying ? If so then my bad, I hope some will get my seat (seems so).
Wish all the fun to students.
