S I R A J R AVA L’ S D E E P L E A R N I N G

N A N O D E G R E E F O U N D AT I O N P R O G R A M

Student Handbook
Artificial Intelligence is transforming our world in dramatic and beneficial ways, and
Deep Learning is powering the progress. Together with Siraj Raval, Udacity provides
a dynamic introduction to this amazing field, using weekly videos, exclusive projects,
and expert feedback and review to teach you the foundations of this future-shaping
technology. To prepare you for this program, we’ve compiled everything you need to
know in this handbook.
 TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Meet the Team 4

Your Resources 8

What to Expect 16

Further Reading 27
MEET THE TEAM
Meet the Team
MEET SIRAJ
Hello, I’m Siraj! I'm a Data Scientist, bestselling author, and YouTube star. I make videos that teach people how to
use machine learning to create game bots, chatbots, self driving cars, programs that create art & music, stock
prediction models, and much more. I'm proud to be an exclusive Udacity partner, and excited to be your host for
this amazing program.

YOUR TEAM
Instructors - Siraj Raval, Mat Leonard, Brok Bucholtz
Services Lead - Luke Rucks
Leads - Orit Avital, Niko Cunningham
Student Support Coordinator - Jessica Park
Community - Lisbeth Ortega
Mentors - Dozens you’ll meet along the way!
YOUR RESOURCES
Forums
In this Nanodegree Foundation program, you’ll have access to an exclusive forum. In this forum
you’ll not only be able to talk to other passionate students, but also receive help from our expert
Coaches and dedicated staff.

We monitor and respond to an ongoing stream of detailed feedback from student forum
participants, and this has allowed us the opportunity to constantly refine, enhance, and upgrade
the model. Thanks to your feedback in the forums, we can ensure the program improves over
time.
Find Forums in the Classroom

1. Open the menu

2. Click on the forums icon

Slack
Udacity students of this program can interact with each other live via Slack. Connect directly with
students who are online the same time as you: ask questions, exchange ideas, and get to know
your fellow classmates.

Join the Slack Team for Deep Learning Nanodegree Foundation students. Once you’re in, click
on Channels, and introduce yourself on the #introductions channel! Make sure to check out the
project channels (ex: #project-1) and lesson channels (ex: #l-intro-to-neural-net) to discuss
classroom topics with other students.
Support
Reach out anytime. Udacity has dedicated support for the Deep Learning Nanodegree
Foundation program. 

Simply reach out on the forums or at [email protected].
 W H AT T O E X P E C T

See our full Deep Learning Nanodegree Foundation FAQ and general Udacity FAQ.
System Requirements
The minimum system requirement is a 64-bit operating system with ~8 GB of RAM. You will
also need to install Python 3 and Jupyter Notebooks.

Later in the program, we will provide you with the AWS instance for more intensive needs.
Class Timeline Pacing
This is a unique, 17 week-long program that will bring students a new lesson on a weekly
basis. Students are expected to keep pace with their peers throughout the duration of the
program and will complete 5 Deep Learning projects by their respective project deadlines.
The entire program takes 4 months to complete.

Weekly Pace
Every Friday at 5pm (Pacific), Siraj will release his initial video covering a concept.
Every Wednesday at 10am (Pacific), Siraj will conduct a one hour live session on this concept.
Every Wednesday, we will release more in-depth content related to this concept.
Class Timeline Curriculum
WEEK 1

Introduction to Deep Learning

Regression

WEEK 2

Neural Networks, Math Notation

Project 1: Your first neural network

WEEK 3

Model Evaluation and Validation

Sentiment Analysis with Andrew Trask

WEEK 4

Graph computations

WEEK 5

Cloud Computing, Intro to Tensorflow,

Data Preparation
WEEK 6

Deep Neural Networks, Deep Learning in TensorFlow,

Convolutional Networks, Image Classification
Project 2: Image Classification
WEEK 7

Recurrent Neural Networks

Stock Predictions and Text Generation

WEEK 8

Word Embeddings
Implementing Word2Vec

WEEK 9

Using TensorBoard
Visualizing Networks

WEEK 10

Text Generation, Natural Language Processing

Project 3: Generate TV scripts

W E E K 11

Sequence to Sequence Generation

Language Processing
WEEK 12

Transfer Learning Building a chatbot

WEEK 13

Reinforcement Learning, AI that plays games

Project 4: Language Translations

WEEK 14

Autoencoders Image Compression

WEEK 15

Generative Adversarial Networks with Ian Goodfellow

Unsupervised Learning

WEEK 16

Image Generation
Generating new images with a GAN

WEEK 17

One-shot Learning, Generate novel faces

Project 5: GAN
Class Timeline Deadlines
Our ultimate goal is to ensure that every single student accepted into the program successfully graduates. Our
coaches and mentors will work directly with any students who are struggling with the timeline requirements.

Deadline for graduation: In order to graduate the program, you must complete, submit and meet expectations
for all required projects within 6 months of your start date. Meeting expectations means a Udacity Reviewer has
marked your project as “Meets Specifications.”

Individual project deadlines: While individual project deadlines are suggested, they are critical to your
success and to reaching graduation. We strongly urge students to keep good standing with regards to individual
project deadlines.
Class Timeline Missing Deadlines
If you do not complete all projects within 6 months of the start of the program, you do not graduate and
earn your credential, and you are no longer eligible to receive automatic admission into the Robotics, Artificial
Intelligence or Self-Driving Car Nanodegree programs. You will be removed from the program and will need to
re-enroll—your progress does not carry over, and you will need to start from the beginning again.

If you miss individual project deadlines, you jeopardize your ability to meet the 6-month requirement,
graduate, receive your credential and your guaranteed admission into the Robotics, Artificial Intelligence or Self-
Driving Car Nanodegree programs. Maintaining good standing with regards to project deadlines is critical to
your success. If you're not keeping pace with your fellow students, forums and Slack channels can lose their
value. Your peer network can break down, because you're no longer working on the same content as the rest of
your class. Plus, you miss out on exclusive content rewards for on-time submissions!
Class Timeline Time Dedication

8-12 HOURS / WEEK

Between instructional content, projects, and other course-related activity, we estimate that
investing 8-12 hours/week will enable you to proceed through the program at a successful pace.
Class Timeline Schedule
Find the dates for each of your project deadlines next to the respective lesson in your
classroom.

Project 1 Your First Neural Network

Project 2 Image Classification
Project 3 Generate TV Scripts
Project 4 Translate a Language
Project 5 Generate Faces
Community
Finding support in fellow students can make all the difference in your educational experience.
Take advantage of Slack and the Udacity forums. These are spaces to exchange ideas,
questions and progress with your classmates.
Community (cont.)
LIVE SESSION S
The live sessions with Siraj Raval are held on Wednesdays at 10am Pacific Standard Time. It is not mandatory that
you attend, but it is highly recommended that you do so, as they will offer a great deal of complementary value!
And please note, if you aren’t able to attend live, they will be available for later review in the classroom.

COMMUNITY EVENTS
Community events will give you the opportunity to meet classmates both on and offline (dependent on location),
team-build and take part in extracurricular opportunities.
What to Expect After Graduation
NANODEGREE CREDENTIAL
Students who graduate the program receive a Udacity credential in Deep Learning Foundations.

CONTINUED LEARNING
Your deep learning practice doesn’t end with graduation. In fact, it’s just beginning — graduation from this program
will guarantee entrance to our Artificial Intelligence, Self-Driving Car, or Robotics Nanodegree programs.
Graduates will also receive $100 off of the first term of their chosen of the above Nanodegrees. The $100 credit is
only applicable to students who enroll in Artificial Intelligence, Self-Driving Car, or Robotics Nanodegree upon
successful completion of Deep Learning Nanodegree Foundation program.

All three of these world-changing programs have a competitive pool of applicants vying for admission, as well as
industry names like Mercedes-Benz and IBM Watson seeking to hire future engineers like you. These programs
will equip you with additional 1:1 mentorship and career support to get you on your path to becoming an engineer
in the field. Read more on the Artificial Intelligence, Self-Driving Car, and Robotics Nanodegree curriculums.
Policy
COST
This Nanodegree Foundation program costs $399.

REFUND
Students have a 7-day window from the day they receive access to the program, the first day of their class, to un-
enroll and request a refund. To request a refund, email [email protected]. Please view Deep
Learning Nanodegree Foundations FAQ for more information.
FURTHER READING
Courses on Udacity
Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree by Google (Currently Available)
Artificial Intelligence for Robots (Free Course)
Intro to Statistics (Free Course)
Deep Learning (Free Course)
Programming Foundations with Python (Free Course)
Introduction to Computer Vision
Recommended Books
Grokking Deep Learning by Andrew Trask. Use our exclusive discount code traskud17 for 40%
off. This provides a very gentle introduction to Deep Learning and covers the intuition more than
the theory.

Neural Networks And Deep Learning by Michael Neilsen. This book is more rigorous than
Grokking Deep Learning and includes a lot of fun, interactive visualizations to play with.

The Deep Learning Book from Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. This online
book has lot of material and is the most rigorous of the three books suggested.
Reading Resources
Deep Learning Nanodegree Foundation Program Syllabus, In Depth (Dhruv Parthasarathy)
Transmission.ai - Self Driving Car & Deep Learning Newsletter (Oliver Cameron)
Machine Learning is Fun! An introduction to Machine Learning (Medium)
Are Udacity Nanodegrees worth it for finding a job? (Quora)
Understanding LSTM Networks (Christopher Ola)
A Beginner's Guide To Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks (Adit Deshpande)
6 areas of AI and machine learning to watch closely (Medium)
Most Cited Deep Learning Papers (Github)
In-Depth on Udacity’s Self-Driving Car Curriculum (David Silver)
AI Nanodegree Program Syllabus: Term 1, In Depth (Dhruv Parthasarathy)
News / Resources
What a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie (Andrej Karpathy)
Neuron explained using simple algebra (Medium)
26-year-old hacker gets $3M for self-driving car startup (CNN)
Identifying rare diseas, lung cancer and more with Deep Learning (Transmission)
3D Faces Generated From 2D Photos, Machines Learning to Hand-Write & More (Transmission)
App Helps Fishermen Instantly ID Their Catch (NVIDIA)
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (Andrej Karpathy)
Write an AI to win at Pong from scratch with Reinforcement Learning (Medium)
Datasets
Kaggle
Reddit
Aggregate of Datasets
Other Resources
Tensorflow Playground
Pytorch
Deep Learning Framework written in Swift to use on apple devices (written by @amund)
MIT 18.06 Introduction to Linear Algebra
Andrej Karpathy CS231n Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning class
SEE YOU IN CLASS!