Overview
"Intelligence: The ability to learn and solve problems" [Webster's dictionary]
"Artificial Intelligence is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software" [Wikipedia]
"The science and engineering of making intelligent machines" [McCarthy]
"The study and design of intelligent agents, where an intelligent agent is a system that perceived its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success" [Russel and Norvig AI book]
This course will introduce the basic ideas and techniques underlying the design of intelligent computer systems. A specific emphasis will be on the statistical and decision-theoretic modeling paradigm.
By the end of this course, you will have built autonomous agents that efficiently make decisions in fully informed, partially observable and adversarial settings. Your agents will draw inferences in uncertain environments and optimize actions for arbitrary reward structures. Your machine learning algorithms will classify handwritten digits and photographs. The techniques you learn in this course apply to a wide variety of artificial intelligence problems and will serve as the foundation for further study in any application area you choose to pursue.
