Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

Udemy.com filed regulatory paperwork for an IPO (initial public offering) yesterday, in the wake of the successful Duolingo’s and Coursera’s launch in the secondary market this year. The company plans to be listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol “UDMY.” Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan will be the lead underwriters for the IPO.

In the filing, the San Francisco-based company showed that its revenue grew 55.6% to $429.9 million in 2020 from a year earlier. However, the start-up incurred a net loss of $77.6 million.

Udemy learning platform has raised to date over $300 million, which will give the company a valuation of about $3.2 billion. However, the company is expected to go public at a much higher valuation, according to Reuters.

Its main investors are Insight Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Mindrock Capital, and Tencent.

Udemy claims to provide over 183,000 courses to 44 million learners in its platform, while its corporate business, named Udemy for Business (UB), is being used by 42% of Fortune 100 companies.

Among other companies, it competes with the likes of Pluralsight, Skillsoft, LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, and edX.

IBL News | New York

Researchers from MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab released this month a report investigating teaching and learning during the pandemic.

The primary finding was that “teachers have not been valued as partners in designing educational response to COVID.”

This exclusion from decision-making processes has demoralized teachers, “especially when combined with worsening working conditions and widening inequalities.”

The report — titled “The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year”— concludes that “teachers have developed a variety of effective instructional strategies in response to the challenging conditions of COVID.”

After noting that “the Delta variant is already disrupting school openings across the country,” the report forecasts that the most effective school systems will be “those that listen seriously to the concerns and insights of teachers and include them in design and decision-making.”

IBL News | New York

Stanford University reached an agreement to takes steps to acquire the Notre Dame de Namur University’s (NDNU) 50-acre campus in Belmont, California, for an undisclosed amount.

This Wednesday, the two schools announced the agreement, which gives Stanford the exclusive right to buy the property until June 15, 2025.

Notre Dame de Namur University’s (NDNU), a private non-profit Roman Catholic institution established in 1851, will continue its operations until the sale is complete.

In the face of a financial crisis, after years of declining enrollment and tuition revenue, Notre Dame de Namur announced in January that it would “transform into a primarily graduate and online university.”

Beth Martin, President of Notre Dame de Namur, said in a statement that the institution “will be able to continue the programs for which we are so well known, and to add new programs directly targeted to changing student needs, including a mix of in-person, hybrid, and fully online programs.”

IBL News | New York

Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiatives continue to accelerate as more organizations embrace the digital transformation of their core operations, research firm Gartner said in its last report, “Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, 2021,” and as shown in the graphic below.

As a result, business firms will further explore emerging technologies to secure competitive advantages, such as nonfungible tokens (NTF), sovereign cloud, data fabric, generative AI, and composable networks.

“Technology innovation is a key enabler of competitive differentiation and is the catalyst for transforming many industries. Breakthrough technologies are continually appearing, challenging even the most innovative organizations to keep up,” said Brian Burke, Research Vice President at Gartner.

There are four trends that are driving AI innovation in the near term, stated Gartner.

• Responsible AI. “Stakeholders are demanding increased trust, transparency, fairness, and auditability of AI technologies,” according to Svetlana Sicular, Research Vice President at Gartner.

• Small and wide data. “By 2025, 70 percent of organizations will be compelled to shift their focus from big to small and wide data, providing more context for analytics and making AI less data-hungry,” Gartner predicts.

• Operationalization of AI platforms. “Only half of AI projects make it from pilot into production, and those that do take an average of nine months to do so,” said Sicular.

• Efficient use of resources. “Given the complexity and scale of the data, models and compute resources involved in AI deployments, AI innovation requires such resources to be used at maximum efficiency,” Gartner explains.

On the other hand, O’Reilly announced a free virtual event that will cover the latest developments, tools, best practices, and critical issues for data and AI. It will take place from 10:00 am to 1:30 pm ET on Thursday, October 14.

Topics of discussion will include prototyping and pipelines to deployment, DevOps, and responsible and ethical AI. In addition, Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly’s Founder, and CEO will deliver the closing address, “The Future of Data and AI.”

Keynotes

• AI in Healthcare
  • Speaker: Jeremy Howard, Founding Researcher, fast.ai
• How to Keep Up with ML
  • Speaker: Aurélien Géron, Author of Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and TensorFlow

Data Track

• Prototype to Pipeline: Evolving from Data Exploration to Automated Data Processing
  • Speaker: Sev Leonard, Senior Software Engineer, Fletch
• Watch Me Learn: Querying Data the Right Way
  • Speaker: Vinoo Ganesh, Head of Business Engineering at Ashler Capital, Citadel
• Improve Data Quality with a Focus on Data Reliability and Observability
  • Speaker: Barr Moses, Cofounder and CEO, Monte Carlo
• Train and Predict with Amazon Redshift ML Using SQL
  • Speakers: Chris Fregly, Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, and Antje Barth, Senior Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services

AI Track

• What’s Still Missing from the Responsible AI Movement
  • Speaker: Aileen Nielsen, Fellow in Law and Technology, ETH Zurich, and Author of Practical Time Series Analysis and Practical Fairness
• MLOps from Zero to One
  • Speaker: Noah Gift, Lecturer at UC Davis and Northwestern and Author of Practical MLOps: Operationalizing ML Models
• NeuralQA: A Usable Library for Question Answering on Large Datasets Using BERT-Based Models
  • Speaker: Victor Dibia, Research Engineer in Machine Learning, Cloudera Fast Forward Labs
• Demystifying Scalable Machine Learning with the Spark Ecosystem
  • Speaker: Adi Polak, Senior Software Engineer and Developer, Microsoft, and Author of the upcoming book Machine Learning with Apache Spark

• Registration site for O’Reilly Radar: Data & AI

IBL News | New York

The open-source training courses on edX.org offered by The Linux Foundation reached two million enrollments to date, according to its data.

The San Francisco-based non-profit organization — that employs Linus Torvalds himself —has released two dozen courses on edX. These classes can be audited for free by the student.

The offerings cover technologies like cloud infrastructure, blockchain, networking, and DevOps.

The most popular classes are:

• Introduction to Linux
• Introduction to Kubernetes
• Introduction to Hyperledger Blockchain Technologies
• Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies
• Blockchain: Understanding its Uses and Implications
• Introduction to Cloud Foundry and Cloud-Native Software Architecture
• Introduction to Open Source Networking Technologies
• Introduction to DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering

Today, Linux powers 98% of the world’s super-computers, most of the servers powering the Internet, and tens of millions of Android smartphones and consumer devices.

“As open source has become dominant in the technology space, The Linux Foundation saw a huge need for more accessible, quality training options to close the skills gap and ensure there is enough talent in the market to meet demand,” said Clyde Seepersad, SVP and General Manager, Training & Certification at The Linux Foundation.

“Our partnership with edX has enabled us to make high-quality training from expert instructors available to millions of people at no cost,” he added.

We're proud to announce we have now trained 2 million individuals worldwide in our @edXOnline courses! Learn more about this milestone and our free courses in #Linux, #Kubernetes, #blockchain, #networking and more at https://t.co/BLwPRmiy4Z #learnlinux #edx #ittraining pic.twitter.com/z2auFsCwrw

— Linux Foundation Training & Certification (@LF_Training) September 23, 2021

IBL News | New York

Walden University demoed its AI-powered tutor named Julian that helps students reinforce their learning through practice. This tool, built with Google Cloud’s AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities, was introduced in early August this year.

This virtual tutor was developed, according to the university, to help students master concepts — not just review them — through on-demand learning activities in a personalized way.

The tool engages students in dialogue via chat functionality, offers learning activities, evaluates student responses, and provides feedback to students as they complete activities.

“Students will see a new set of activities generated by the AI-powered tutor every time they interact with the tool,” explained Karthik Venkatesh, CIO at Walden. “It also creates educational notes for the student, which they can reference throughout the program and beyond.”

Students who tried the Walden-AI instructor agreed it is “a good addition to their learning process, and particularly useful in adding to their knowledge on various concepts and for completing assignments.”

“This application of AI has the potential to open so many doors for further student engagement and success,” noted Steven Butschi, Head of Education at Google Cloud. “By working with Walden University on this technology, we look forward to getting real-time feedback and incorporating learnings to continue iterating on this tool to help students and faculty alike.”

In the video below, Walden’s CTO, Steven Tom, Walden’s CIO Karthik Venkatesh, and Google Cloud’s Lukman Ramsey provide an overview of the AI-powered tutor and a demonstration.

IBL News | New York

Even in the face of the pandemic, starting salaries for new college graduates are climbing: 2.5% compared to the previous year of 2019.

The average starting salary for the Class of 2020 was $55,260, according to a new report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

Technical and STEM-related majors were the highest-paid among students earning bachelor’s degrees.

The list of the ten majors was led by petroleum engineering, computer programming, and computer engineering, as shown in the graphic below.

Another growth area was healthcare, especially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the increased demand for nurses as frontline workers fueled the 2.1% increase for registered nursing majors to $58,626 for the Class of 2020.

Source: Summer 2021 Salary Survey, National Association of Colleges and Employers

IBL News | New York

Skills in cloud and container technologies are now in the most demand, as 88% of professionals are using DevOps practices, and most of the companies increase their use of those tools. Meanwhile, 92% of hiring managers are having difficulty finding enough talent to fill open positions.

These findings are included in the 9^th annual Open Source Jobs Report elaborated by The Linux Foundation and edX after surveying over 750 open-source software professionals worldwide and 200 hiring managers.

As the hiring is rebounding in the wake of the pandemic, the talent shortage persists. Furthermore, the rapid adoption of open-source software, and, especially cloud-native applications, is widening the skills gap in the market.

Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation, explained that “open source talent is in high demand, and for those looking for the best career paths, it is evident that cloud-native computing, DevOps, Linux, and security hold the most promising opportunities.”

“Employers are meeting these needs by increasing training and learning opportunities,” said Johannes Heinlein, Chief Commercial Officer and SVP of Strategic Partnerships at edX.

In this context, employers are reporting that they prioritize training investments to close skills gaps, with 58% using this tactic; by comparison, 29% bring in external consultants to close their skill gaps.