IIT Kharagpur Opens Applications for Free Deep Learning Course

• IIT Kharagpur launches a free Deep Learning course on SWAYAM from January 19, 2026.
• The course covers ML basics to advanced DL models like CNNs and Autoencoders.
• An optional Rs 1,000 certification exam will be held on April 25, 2026, for eligible UG/PG students.

IIT Kharagpur, in partnership with SWAYAM, has launched registrations for its free online Deep Learning course. The program starts in January 2026, and students eager to explore image recognition, speech recognition, and related AI tasks can register via the SWAYAM portal - onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in. The final date for registration is January 26, 2026, and attending the exam is not mandatory.

The course, instructed by Dr. Prabir Kr. Biswas begins with Machine Learning fundamentals, including Bayesian Classification and Multilayer Perceptron, and subsequently advances to modern Deep Learning architectures such as Convolutional Neural Networks and Autoencoders.

The course emphasizes the use of Deep Learning techniques to tackle practical issues. Instances of real-life issues involve diagnosing illnesses from medical imaging, recognizing individuals, animals, or objects in photos, driving voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa, facilitating chatbots, detecting fraud via text patterns, forecasting weather or traffic, and assisting autonomous systems such as drones, industrial robots, and self-driving cars.

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Students registered in UG or PG programs can participate in the course. It is scheduled to operate for 12 weeks, starting January 19, 2026, and concluding April 17, 2026. Students who are presently participating in UG or PG programs such as Electronics and Communication Engineering, Computer Science, or Electrical Engineering and possess knowledge of Linear Algebra, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and Partial Differential Equations (PDE) are eligible to enroll in the online course.

Students seeking a certificate must attend a supervised, in-person exam by paying a fee of Rs. 1,000. The test is scheduled for April 25, 2026. To obtain a certificate, students must achieve a minimum of 10 marks out of 25 in Assignments and at least 30 out of 75 in the examination.