Britain's college launches online Masters degree in machine learning

LONDON, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Imperial College London announced on Tuesday that it is launching a new Masters degree in autumn 2020, and it will be one of the first online courses focusing on Machine learning and its applications.

Developed in partnership with the online education platform Coursera, the degree and its related courses will teach students in the computational, mathematical and statistical foundations of Machine Learning.

Machine learning is the scientific study of algorithms that computer systems use to perform specific tasks without using explicit instructions, relying on patterns and inference instead. It is seen as being closely related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and has a number of applications in products and services used in daily life.

"The degree integrates training in ethics and the limitations of Machine Learning in order to equip the data scientists and Machine Learning specialists we train with the skills to ethically apply these techniques to their future work," said Professor Niall Adams, one of the course leaders for the new degree.

The Imperial College London is world-renowned for its AI and Machine learning expertise. One of the first high-level programming languages, Autocode, was invented at the Imperial, and the university has more than 600 people working in areas related to AI.