Written by Rahul Dave on 

About Founding Univ.AI

  1. I wanted to update people with what I have been upto recently.. When I finished my lectureship at Harvard in the middle of 2019, I decided to continue doing what I love most: teaching!

  2. At Harvard I had the privilege of teaching cs109, the Harvard Data Science/ML/AI intro course, CS207, which I called Computer Science for Scientists, and AM207: Stochastic Methods and Bayesian Inference.

  3. So, along with Siddharth Das (@sid_1973) and some other like minded professors, we founded in India, in late 2019 our company Univ.AI https://univ.ai to teach Data Science and AI in a high quality, university-like way, but at much lower cost than college.

  1. I am originally from India. My partner and I moved to India along with our then 3 1/2 year old. My partner is doing her Ph.D. on migrant female construction workers in India. So the timing really worked for us.

  2. We trained two cohorts of incredible students in India. Our best students there were totally on par with the best I trained at Harvard. And they were NOT all from eminent Indian technical Universities like the IITs.

  3. As part of the first cohort, we ran a summer school. But soon, Covid pushed us to make our programs all online. This was not the original plan, but has in retrospect allowed us to be able to attract more diverse students, from all over India.

  4. For example, we've taught a lot of women. Female participation in the workforce in India has actually decreased since the eighties ☹️. Seeing Indian women empower themselves with specialized education has been very heartening.

  5. Our students have gone on to great jobs, to do research, and to join good Masters Programs back in the US. Some of them became our teaching assistants for the next cohort. They turned out to be stellar teachers! I could not be prouder!

  6. And this leads me to think that we are missing a lot of talent, in India, in the US, and probably all over the world. It convinces me that that my original premise in starting Univ.AI: the democratization of high-quality university-style education is a GOOD THING to do.

  7. I am back in the US now. And we've just launched out first cohort here in the US, and globally. Our courses run live, with lots of hands-on work including exercises, labs, homework, and projects. tons of mentorship. This cohort starts on the 19th of September.

  8. You can take our programs (https://www.univ.ai/programs) after taking our entrance test or taking pyDS. You can also take our courses ala-carte (https://www.univ.ai/courses)! Our courses and programs are reasonably priced, much cheaper than university.

  1. Starting this Saturday, the 14th of August, pyDS https://welcome.univ.ai/Foundations/PyDS/ will train you to program in python, and at the same time, teach you the concepts of mathematics and statistics that you will need to succesfully complete our programs.

  1. If you want to sign up, we are, for a limited time, offering pyDS at $70 and AI-1 at $375, which I think are total steals. Use code USQ3VO at https://univ.ai/featured! Should you decide to take up a longer program after, it's cost will also drop by the difference.

  2. I'll be tweeting in more detail about our programs this week! Please feel free to at or DM me (@rahuldave). You can also access a permalink to this thread here: https://stories.univ.ai/aboutfoundingunivai/, should you like to bookmark it.