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Last Updated on August 19, 2019

It can be difficult to get started in deep learning.

Thankfully, a number of universities have opened up their deep learning course material for free, which can be a great jump-start when you are looking to better understand the foundations of deep learning.

In this post you will discover the deep learning courses that you can browse and work through to develop and cement your understanding of the field.

This is a long post that deep links into many videos. It is intended for you to bookmark, browse and jump into specific topics across courses rather than pick one course and complete it end-to-end.

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Let’s get started.

Overview

We will take a quick look at the following 6 deep learning courses.

Deep Learning at Oxford Deep Learning at Udacity by Google Deep Learning Summer School at Montreal Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing at Stanford Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition at Stanford Neural networks Class at Université de Sherbrooke

There is also a “Other Courses” section at the end to gather additional video courses that are not free, broken or smaller in scope and don’t neatly fit into this summary review.

Course Tips and How To Use This Post

There are a lot of courses and a lot of great free material out there.

My best advice is:

Do not pick a course and work through it end-to-end.

This is counter to what most people suggest.

Your impulse will be to “get serious” and pick “the best” course and work through all of the material. You will almost certainly fail.

The material is tough and you will need to take your time and get multiple different perspectives on each topic.

The very best way to really get into this material is to work through it topic by topic and draw from across all of the courses until you really understand a topic, before moving onto the next topic.

You do not need to understand all topics and you do not need to use a single source to understand a single topic.

Bookmark this page, then browse, sample and dip into the material you need, when you need it as you learn how to implement actual real deep learning models in code using a platform like Keras.

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Deep Learning at Oxford

This is a machine learning course that focuses on deep learning taught at Oxford by Nando de Freitas.

I really like this course. I watched all of the videos on double time and took notes. It provides a good foundation in theory and covers modern deep learning topics such as LSTMs. Code examples are shown in Torch.

I noted that the syllabus differed from the actual video lectures available and the YouTube playlist listed the lectures out of order, so below is the list of 2015 video lectures in order.

The highlight for me was Alex Graves‘ talk on RNNs (Lecture 13). A smart guy doing great work. I was reading a lot of Alex’s papers at the time I watch this video so I may be biased.

Resources

Deep Learning at Udacity by Google

This is a mini course collaboration between Arpan Chakraborty from Udacity and Vincent Vanhoucke, a Principal Scientist at Google.

The course is free, hosted on Udacity and focuses on TensorFlow. It is a small piece of the broader Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree by Google hosted on Udacity.

You must sign-up to Udacity, but once you sign-in you can access this course for free.

All course videos are on YouTube, but (intentionally) really hard to find with poor naming and linking. If anyone knows of a pirate playlist with all of the videos, please post it in the comments.

The course is divided into 4 lessons:

Lesson 1: From Machine Learning to Deep Learning

Lesson 2: Deep Neural Networks

Lesson 3: Convolutional Neural Networks

Lesson 4: Deep Models for Text and Sequences

The course is short but is broken up into many short videos and the Udacity interface is nice. Vincent seems to present in all of the videos I looked at (which is great) and videos are shown in the YouTube interface.

There is also a discussion form where you can ask and answer questions, driven by the slick discourse software.

My preference was to dip into videos that interested me rather than completing the whole course or doing any of the course work.

Resources

Deep Learning Summer School at Montreal

A deep learning supper school was held in 2015 at the University of Montreal.

According to the website, the summer school was aimed at graduate students and industrial engineers and researchers who already have some basic knowledge of machine learning.

There were at least 30 talks (there are 30 videos) from notable researchers in the field of deep learning on a range of topics from introductory material to state of the art research.

These videos are are a real treasure trove. Take your time and pick your topics carefully. All videos are hosted on the VideoLectures.net site, which has an good enough interface, but not as clean as YouTube.

Many (all?) talks had PDF slides linked below the video, and more information is available from the schedule page on the official website.

Here’s the full list of lecture topics with links to the videos. I’ve tried to list related videos together (e.g. part 1, part 2).

Pick a topic and dive in. So good!

It looks like there will be a 2016 summer school and hopefully there will be videos.

Resources

Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing at Stanford

This is a deep learning course focusing on natural language processing (NLP) taught by Richard Socher at Stanford.

An interesting note is that you can access PDF versions of student reports, work that might inspire you or give you ideas.

The YouTube playlist has poorly named files and some missing lectures. The 2016 videos are not all uploaded yet. Below is a list of the 2015 lectures and the links to the videos. Much easier for just jumping into a specific topic.

This is great material if you are into deep learning for NLP, an area where it really excels.

Resources

Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition at Stanford

This course focuses on the use of deep learning for computer vision applications with convolutional neural networks.

It is another course taught at Stanford, this time by Andrej Karpathy and others.

Unfortunately, the course videos were taken down, but some clever people have found ways to put them back up in other places. See the playlists in the resources section below.

I regret to inform that we were forced to take down CS231n videos due to legal concerns. Only 1/4 million views of society benefit served 🙁 — Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) May 3, 2016

Another great course.

Below are the video lectures for the 2016 course, but I’m not sure how long the links will last. Leave a comment and let me know if you discover the links turned bad and I’ll fix them up.

Resources

Neural Networks Class at Université de Sherbrooke

This is a course on neural networks taught by Hugo Larochelle at the University in Sherbrooke in Québec.

There is a ton of material. A ton.

The videos are one-on-one rather than lectures and there are many small videos for each topic rather than large one hour info dumps.

I think this might be a better format than the traditional lectures, but I’m not completely won over yet. A difficulty is there are 92 videos (!!!) to browse and it can be hard to find specific videos to watch.

The material is taught covering 10 main topics:

Topic 1: Feedforward neural networks

Topic 2: Training neural networks

Topic 3: Conditional random fields

Topic 4: Training Conditional random fields

Topic 5: Restricted Boltzmann machine

Topic 6: Autoencoders

Topic 7: Deep learning

Topic 8: Sparse coding

Topic 9: Computer vision

Topic 10: Natural language processing

My recommendation is to use the main course home page to browse the topics and then use those links into the specific videos. The YouTube playlist has far too many videos to browse and understand. The paradox of choice will kill you.

Resources

Other Courses

Below are some additional video courses that are either not free, difficult to access or smaller in scope.

Summary

In this post you have discover a number of world class video courses on deep learning covering, theory, computer vision, natural language processing and more.

Heed the advice at the top of this post.

Browse and dip into lectures by topic and do not try to take on a whole course. Learn one thing rather than try and learn everything.

Take your time, bookmark this page so you can come back, and have fun.

Do you know of some other video courses on deep learning that I have not listed?

Let me know in the comments and I will update the list.

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