Want to Learn about Artificial Intelligence for the Real World? 

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has generated wild excitement due its potential to transform businesses and societies around the world with technologies like ChatGPT, Dall-E, self-driving cars, Google Maps, Machine Translators, and Shazam, and yet, it has evoked tremendous fear and doomsday warnings about possible negative impacts like increasing unemployment, exacerbating injustices, data breaches and circumventing humans oversight. How does one learn AI to use them in the real world while also steering around practical issues? This course will introduce AI and also guide towards its safe usage for real-world applications. 

Prerequisites

Experience with a first course in data structures (CSCE 350), programming (CSCE 330) 

 Learning outcomes

• L1: Appreciate and work with diversity of data– text, speech and visual; focus will be, however, structured data  (e.g., tables) and text (NLP; English)

• L2: Learn techniques to derive insights from data spanning reasoning (e.g., symbolic) and learning (e.g., neural) in a decision-making setup

• L3: Learn methods to represent and organize insights

• L4: Make insights usable with people in a collaborative setting (“chatbots”)

• L5: Understand issues related to usage of AI methods/ tools with people.

• L6: Gain experience by build a real-work AI

Topics Covered

• Week 1: Introduction, Aim: Chatbot / Intelligence Agent

• Weeks 2-3: Data: Formats, Representation and the Trust Problem

• Week 4-5: Search, Heuristics - Decision Making

• Week 6: Constraints, Optimization – Decision Making

• Week 7: Classical Machine Learning – Decision Making, Explanation

• Week 8: Machine Learning - Classification

• Week 9: Machine Learning - Classification – Trust Issues and Mitigation Methods

• Topic 10: Learning neural network, deep learning, Adversarial attacks

• Week 11: Large Language Models – Representation, Issues

• Topic 12: Markov Decision Processes, Hidden Markov models  - Decision making

• Topic 13: Planning, Reinforcement Learning – Sequential decision making

• Week 14: AI for Real World: Tools, Emerging Standards and Laws; Safe AI/ Chatbots