In 2018, Finland launched a free online crash course in artificial intelligence. The aim of of this course was to educate its citizens about the new opportunities, threats, approaches to this new technology. Finland is making the six week program available to everyone.

More than 1 percent of the Nordic nation’s 5.5 million citizens signed up. The course, named Elements of AI, is currently available in English, Swedish, Estonian, Finnish, and German and other languages are being added.

There are many free courses on Udemy, Coursera and edX for people looking to learn the basics of AI, but Finland’s course offers something for everybody, even if you are not very technically inclined but want to be aware of what AI has in store. Elements of AI is a series of free online courses created by the Finnish technology company Reaktor and the University of Helsinki. The course is nicely designed, offers short tests at the end of each section, and covers a vast range of topics from the philosophical implications of AI to technical subjects like machine learning, neural networks and social and cultural implications of AI. Each section takes between five and ten hours and the course itself could take upto six weeks. The courses combine theory with practical exercises and can be completed at your own pace.

And how popular has this course been so far? 230,000 people from 110 countries have signed up for this course and 40% of these are women.

Head over to Elements of AI and get started on this technology that is expected to rule many aspects of our lives in the new decade. The original article announcing the release of this course is here on University of Helsinki website.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence, Blog, Computer Science

Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Finland, Implications of AI, machine learning, neural networks