Sundog Software’s subsidiary, Sundog Education has a mission of teaching valuable techinical skills to students around the world at low cost. Over 180,000 students from 180 different countries have learned the basics of data science, machine learning, big data, cloud computing, and deep learning – often for just $5 – $15.

Sundog Education launched its newest course today: Building Recommender Systems with Machine Learning and AI. In it, Sundog Software’s founder, Frank Kane, shares what he learned from 9 years at Amazon.com where he managed teams building recommender and personalization systems. Recommender systems are the algorithms and back-end systems that automatically learn your individual, unique interests given your past ratings and behavior, and try to get the perfect product, video, or content in front of you that you’re likely to love. They’re core to the mission of not only Amazon, but also Netflix, YouTube, and Google.

It’s always been an exciting field, but it’s especially exciting now that deep learning, artificial neural networks, and AI are being deployed on this problem. For students new to deep learning, the course includes a introduction to deep learning that takes you through the origins of artificial neural networks to using modern convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and more. It’s all very hands-on, with lots of activities and exercises in Python to let you practice what you’ve learned, and develop your own working recommendation engine that uses real movie ratings from real people.

Check it out on Udemy if you’re interested in branching out into the exciting world of machine learning and recommendation engines.