Sounds pretty similar to Udacity's AI for Robots course! Good to know that they focus on intuition rather than rigor. Many professor enjoy stroking their ego with rigorous math, rather than communicating higher-level ideas and making their subject seem "easy".

That perspective seems a little naive.

They are professionals, so they know "what it takes" to be good at the subject.

Machine learning math is not rigorous in comparison to the type of math you'd study as a math or physics major.

Machine learning math is useful precisely because of the fact that it shows you intuitively how the concepts work.

Knowing the "high level" ideas is near-useless. I can get the "high level" ideas of quantum mechanics from any high school or pop science physics book. Does that mean I know quantum mechanics? Only at an extremely superficial level.

And I suspect anyone taking a MOOC on AI or machine learning wants to end up with more than superficial knowledge.

Sorry I wasn't clear about "high level".

I was mostly speaking about math professors in college. I have degrees in Math and EE...advance math isn't an issue.

Having abstract intuition (aka "high level ideas") in math is incredibly value.

Sometimes things get hairy in the computation and you need to step back and consider the bigger picture again.

If you don't understand how the math works then you don't have the intuition and vice-vera.

AI for Robotics is a way way simpler course than SDC ;-) In SDC you actually get to train CNN to classify traffic signs from the scratch, to make a car in a racing game learn to drive similarly to your style and to detect real-world road features properly as you are driving. It made me smile very often when I saw how simple they made it appear :)

Of course haha! I was remarking on the breadth by which they explore and prove the underlying math.