What do Watson of Jeopardy fame and Pandora have in common? Both use forms of artificial intelligence, a vast and complex field that is constantly being explored. It can be a daunting subject for those who haven’t studied it. Fortunately, Stanford will offer an introductory course on Artificial Intelligence for free online this fall.
Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig will be the professors. Thrun is a major figure in the AI community. As a professor of Computer Science at Stanford, he spearheaded the development of the self-driving car which earned him accolades from Time Magazine. Norvig is the Director of Research at Google and wrote the premier textbook on AI, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
The class will run from October 6 until December 16 this year. Online students have the ability to watch lecture videos, read the lectures, complete homework, and take quizzes, the midterm and final. The class will also be taught to students on Stanford’s campus which will begin September 27.
Over the course of ten weeks, Professors Thrun and Norvig will cover: an overview of AI, statistics, machine learning, hidden Markov models, Bays nets, Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, adversarial planning, logic, image processing, robotics, and natural language processing. You can look at the syllabus here.
For online students, the professors will be available indirectly. Those who need to ask questions can submit their queries, and they will be aggregated. The most popular ones will be discussed by Norvig and Thrun during their lectures. Quizzes and exams will be administered and graded electronically.
Online students who are not Stanford students will not receive credit from Stanford. Rather, they will receive a certificate acknowledging that they have completed the course.
Over 70,000 people have signed up. Will you?