The pandemic has shown the importance of online education more than ever. With schools shut down and left barren, teachers had to let go of their traditional ways and adapt to the digital world. However, one educator has leaped beyond that — way before the pandemic — and is helping millions of students across the world get quality education. Coursera, the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) platform he co-founded, is one of the largest out there, providing free or affordable education. His own courses on the platform have gathered hundreds of thousands of enrollments. In addition, his lectures have reached millions of views on YouTube. His way of breaking down complex ideas into bite-sized pieces, combined with his soothing and motivating teaching style, has helped him amass a huge following worldwide. 

Any student who has ever studied a machine learning course will likely know who Andrew Ng is. Ng is a British-born American computer scientist, educator, and technologist. The Stanford professor has authored hundreds of research papers and his works have been cited more than 200,000 times — an astounding number for any researcher. He co-founded and led Google Brain and was the Chief Scientist at Baidu, one of the largest internet companies in the world that is based in China. A household name in the industry, his introductory machine learning and deep learning courses have allowed countless learners, even some of the biggest names in the industry, a swift entry into the AI field. For his contributions, Andrew Ng has been included in the TIME100 most influential individuals and Fortune’s “40 Under 40” in 2013. 

Landing AI, a startup Ng founded in 2017, is now helping startups get into AI. While the current AI industry is focusing on big data applications, his company is attempting to break the barrier for other industries which don’t have an ocean of data lying around to join the AI revolution by putting an emphasis on the importance of “good data” instead of “big data”. So much money is invested and so many projects are dedicated to AI research, particularly in the lucrative applications of recommender systems and online advertisements. However, with his startup, he is now working towards revolutionizing other industries such as agriculture, healthcare, logistics, retail, and especially, manufacturing. “AI is the new electricity”, says Ng, and with that, he points to the possibility of applying AI in poverty study, environmental hazard prediction, and climate change modeling.

A few months ago, Ng announced that an updated version of his courses, which are to be expanded into a specialization program, are coming. With his ability to predict trends in AI, his new release is highly anticipated. Spearheading the movement to data-centric AI, he is now set out to realize AI as the catalyst for the Fourth Industrial Revolution — just like how electricity was for the Third Industrial Revolution.