Congratulations – You’ve been Accepted

It was my birthday and a little email arrived from Udacity titled “Congratulations, you’re going to be one of our very first Self-Driving Car students!”. I had never thought with the number of people that were applying that I’d have a chance. Yet here was the email as a birthday present. I was both thrilled and apprehensive – I’d gotten in and now had to follow through.

I’ve been fascinated with robotics and AI for quite sometime now. And as always I seem to be too early with investigating business endeavours in Australia related to such. Whilst my cycling project was interesting, I was getting bogged down with having to learn how to use all the technology by myself. It always surprised me that I was able to get some results given how large the US teams seems to be that were using the same open source projects.

I’d applied to the program, because I thought I could leverage what I’d been learning through my previous endeavours around learnings from my cycling big data sensor project. The course had a focus on using things like ROS (Robotic Operating System), TensorFlow and Open Computer Vision. Plus it’d just seemed to be a great idea to work on technology related to self driving vehicles in a structured way. There is so much interest in this subject matter.

When I shared with my Facebook friends, that I’d been accepted, it was the most liked post I think I’ve ever had. Speaking people they say “wow thats great”. So its past the litmus test and I’ve just started.