As part of NVIDIA’s Developer program, the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) is one of the leading avenues for education, training, and instructor-led solutions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), accelerated computing, and data science. It provides multiple hands-on online courses to developers, data scientists, researchers, IT professionals, teachers, and university students, and helps them to improve their technical skills.
NVIDIA has long been known in the field of graphics processing technology. As this technology evolved and began to be applied in AI and accelerated computing applications outside traditional graphics, developers needed the training to understand how these tools could be used to innovate and transform new areas of business and technology. This served as an inspiration to offer courses within the Deep Learning Institute (DLI). The DLI training content covers fast-developing fields for which traditional university programs may not be sufficiently nimble to deliver state-of-the-art technology (e.g., recommender systems, data engineering pipelines, distributed training, video analytics, autonomous vehicles).
Developed by subject matter experts working on the cutting edge of technology, DLI courses and workshops aim to teach how to implement and deploy an end-to-end project in one day, providing real-world and hands-on experience. The target audience varies from developers and IT professionals to teachers or university students interested to quickly upskill and break into the latest technologies. With a wide range of DLI training content, end-users have the flexibility to select topics of interest, level of proficiency in the technology, and time commitment (from two to eight hours each).
When it comes to the format, DLI courses consist of a mix of narrative texts, visualisations, and interactive code snippets, in this way providing an engaging learning experience. Assessments are graded automatically, so that end-users receive immediate feedback on their work and have a chance to quickly obtain the official certification of completion. To remove the entry barrier in terms of required hardware, all training resources are leveraged via cloud computing and training can be accessed via a standard web browser.
As a part of a learning experience, the DLI also offers Teaching Kits for educators at universities to help successfully incorporate AI and graphics processing units (GPU) computing into their coursework. To stay up-to-date, the DLI catalogue of content is routinely revised and complemented to reflect the latest technology trends. As explained by NVIDIA representatives, the DLI training meets the demand from the developer community to learn new and advanced software development skills that are vital to staying ahead in a competitive job market.
Further DLI course development is encouraged by the end-users who often provide positive feedback on the training. “Conversations during the course have resulted in the generation of new projects leveraging AI to solve problems in the Earth observation space”, says Stephen Goult from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. Timothée Carayol, Data Science Expertise Lead at the ING Germany describes the DLI courses as a great success, highlighting that “the lectures and labs were inspiring and fun”.
So far, the DLI has trained over 250,000 developers globally. In 2020 alone, around 75,000 learners participated in the courses – this is 35 % more than in the previous year. To make it even more accessible for everyone, in March 2021, NVIDIA started offering workshops for the general public.