As you read this, Udacity’s Intersect 2017 conference is officially happening! The event has been sold out for weeks. Hundreds of people are filling every available space in Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, a fitting location for this historic occasion. More than 30,000 people are joining via the event livestream. A remarkable day is planned, with keynote speeches, panel discussions, breakout sessions, and an employer showcase.
Two New Nanodegree Programs
Among the many exciting things taking place are some very important announcements from Udacity. To begin, we are debuting not one, but two new Nanodegree programs!
Each breaks significant new ground for Udacity, and together these programs fully embody the theme of our conference: Learning for the Jobs of Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond.
First up, we are thrilled to announce our new Robotics Nanodegree program!
The Udacity Robotics Nanodegree Program
Whole industries are being transformed by the power of robotics, and we are witnessing remarkable increases in productivity, safety, and efficiency in so many different arenas—healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, construction, and transportation, to name just a few. New opportunities are emerging every day, but these jobs require special skills. We have built this program in collaboration with cutting-edge robotics engineering companies like Electric Movement, to equip the next generation of forward-thinking roboticists with the job-ready skills they’ll need to build successful careers in the field, and to start leveraging the power of robotics to better our world in innovative and beneficial new ways.
You can learn more about our Robotics Nanodegree program here. We have world-class hiring partners such as Bosch, iRobot, Kuka, Lockheed Martin, MegaBots, Uber ATG, and X (Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory), as well as expert content collaborators, and a curriculum that enables students to work in both simulated environments and on real hardware. If you’re ready to start powering positive change through the power of robotics, apply today!
We are additionally very excited the introduce our new Digital Marketing Nanodegree program!
The Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Program
Together with an incredible group of partner companies—who collectively represent the absolute leading edge of digital marketing innovation—we have built a unique curriculum that affords students the opportunity to run real-world campaigns as they develop a 360-degree understanding of the field. Experts from Facebook, Google, Hootsuite, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Moz, and more have joined us to prepare a new generation of job-ready digital marketers to meet the demands of an industry currently spending over $70 billion a year, and on track to grow that investment by 40% in the next 4 years.
You’ll find a full description of our new Digital Marketing Nanodegree program here. Learn more about our curriculum, our hiring partners—which include Capital One, and global e-commerce giants Rakuten and Zalando—and the uniquely holistic approach we’ve developed. This program offers students the opportunity to master platform-specific skills valued by top employers, while at the same time establishing a broad understanding of the whole digital marketing ecosystem. If you’re ready to bring creativity and technology together in the service of creating meaningful campaigns that produce measurable results, enroll today! There is no previous experience required.
If that weren’t enough excitement for one day, we have more big news to share. Today, we have the pleasure of introducing you to 21 new Udacity hiring partners!
New Hiring Partners!
X (Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory), MegaBots, Fiat Chrysler, iRobot, Lockheed Martin,
1mg, CI&T, Delphi, IBM Brazil, Innovation Works, Kuka, Paytm, Rakuten, Renovo, Ross Intelligence, SAP, Telefonica Vivo Brazil, Velodyne, Zalando, ZEISS, Zomato
Each of these companies is eager to engage with Udacity talent, because they know our graduates will have the necessary skills to fill their most important roles. Our hiring partners provide key insights that help us understand how to build the most valuable programs possible, and they’re each ready to fast track graduates for job consideration as new openings emerge.
We are especially excited to introduce these partners at Intersect 2017, as together they bring to life our dream of directly connecting learning to jobs for our students. Recruiters and hiring managers from many of these companies are with us today for the employer showcase. Additional details about the showcase can be found here, including a detailed list of the open roles our partners are actively hiring for right now.
We have another partnership we’d like to now highlight. Together with Didi Chuxing—the world’s largest mobile tech-based transportation platform—we are announcing the Udacity-Didi Self-Driving Car Challenge!
The Udacity-Didi Self-Driving Car Challenge
Self-Driving Car enthusiasts across the globe are invited to compete for a $100,000 prize, and the opportunity to have their code run on the world’s first open-source autonomous vehicle—ours!
The focus of this competition will be on a core feature of self-driving cars—the Automated Safety and Awareness Processing Stack (ASAPS), which identifies stationary and moving objects from a moving car, using data that includes Velodyne point cloud, radar objects, and camera image frames. Competitors are challenged to create a redundant, safe, and reliable system for detecting hazards; one that allows for pedestrian, vehicle, and general obstacle-detection useful to both human drivers and self-driving car systems.
Learn more about the Self-Driving Car Challenge here, and don’t delay on registering—the first competition round starts March 22, 2017.
For our fourth and final Intersect announcement, we return to where we began—our new Robotics Nanodegree program.
Deep Learning Foundations Students to receive Guaranteed Admission to our new Robotics Nanodegree Program!
As with all our advanced programs, there are a number of important prerequisites students must meet to enter the Robotics program, and there is an application process to enroll. However, as we prepare to open a new term of enrollments for our Deep Learning Foundations program, we are very pleased to announce that graduates of the Deep Learning Foundations program will receive guaranteed admission to our Robotics Nanodegree program!
Robotics joins Self-Driving Cars and Artificial Intelligence to make it three advanced fields that our Deep Learning program now tracks you for, establishing it as one of the most valuable programs we have for students who are ready to lay the foundations for their future careers. You can learn more about our Deep Learning Foundations program here.
And with that, we complete our announcements for Intersect 2017!
Gratitude
Bringing this event to life as been an extraordinary undertaking for all at Udacity, and we want to thank our students, our partners, our speakers, our guests, and all the individuals that make up the Udacity community for helping make this day possible. Your lives, your stories, your achievements are what power our efforts—today, tomorrow, and beyond.
As our guests move through the Computer History Museum today, all around them are testaments to previous generations of dreamers, forward-thinkers, and innovators who together built the future we now occupy. This is the story the museum tells.
To our Udacity students today, we say that someday, your story too will be told. And if upon a page in that tale the name Udacity should appear, we will be honored to have played a part in the story of your success.
From all of us at Udacity, to all of you who have trusted us to join you on your journey, we say thank you.
