How does your assertion contradict the quoted excerpt? It merely states that Ng's course began in 2003 with a relatively small number of students, and that few other colleges had taught such a course 15 years ago. Not that Ng invented the field of machine learning.
> This course did not exist until 2003, when Professor Ng taught it for the first time with 68 students, and very little like it existed anywhere on college campuses 15 years ago.
I took a Machine Learning course as part of my degree in 2001/2. About half of my year in the department attended. The course had been running for many years and I understood it to be a standard fixture in CS department curricula across the UK at the time.
