After receiving a poor pick time for my second semester in the program, I know that it would be difficult for me to follow my intended course schedule. As expected I had to pick from the remaining available classes and led me to enrolling in reinforcement learning. I had hoped to take this class after getting a few machine learning courses under my belt, but looks like I will be diving straight in. Based on OMSCentral reviews this is one of the more time intensive courses in the program. Luckily, I have a high level understanding of machine learning concepts from my work on a machine leaning for air traffic management survey paper. Additionally, I have preordered the textbook for this course and plan to read ahead during Christmas break.
A critique I have heard repeated of reinforcement learning is that results from many of the papers published are maddeningly hard to recreate. There is a section of the class where we attempt to do just that that I am particularly excited for. This course will steer me towards or away from the machine learning specialization so I hope that I am able to dedicate enough time toward it in order to gain a deep understanding of the material.
Ultimately, I do not expect reinforcement learning to be relevant to my current work, but hope that the experience gained from it will help me to transition to machine learning related roles and projects.
I am taking this course primarily because it is the best available and I would like to take two courses a semester. Per the course description, this course will be a survey on techniques for saying software is correct and tools for code analysis. The professor specified that this course is structured for someone doing code development rather than testing and will be primarily taught using C++ with the LLVM compiler framework.
This course seems like it will be directly applicable to my work and my goals as I am currently working on c++ projects and would like a greater understanding of industry standard code analysis techniques. The difficulty ratings are all across the board, but I feel that my prior experience will give me an advantage on the steep learning curve. Overall I am excited to sharpen my coding practices and learn about the tools used to establish formal code correctness.