Hey Socialphers,

I recently signed up for a course on Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. The course is offered for free and to anyone online. This includes lectures, homeworks, possibly some quizzes, a midterm, and a final. Anyone can sign up and take the course, so if your interested keep reading below where I post the syllabus and other information. See you in class Mrs. Vaughn!

Stanford CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig

Overview

CS221 is the introductory course into the field of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. It covers basic elements of AI, such as knowledge representation, inference, machine learning, planning and game playing, information retrieval, and computer vision and robotics. CS221 is a broad course aimed to teach students the very basics of modern AI. It is prerequisite to many other, more specialized AI classes at Stanford University.

Instructors

Professors Peter Novig and Sebastian Thrun took over CS221 from Professor Andrew Y. Ng in 2010. Peter Norvig is author of the celebrated textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. He is also Director of Research at Google. Thrun is well known for his work on robotics and self-driving cars (His team won the DARPA Grand Challenge). Thrun is research professor at Stanford and a Google Fellow. He is one of the youngest individuals ever elected into the National Academy of Engineering (at age 39).

Who Should Attend?

With an in-class enrollment of nearly 200 students, CS221 is one of the largest courses taught at Stanford University, across all departments and all disciplines. It is included in the core curriculum of several degree programs at Stanford. The course is tailored towards advanced undergraduate or early graduate students, new to Artificial Intelligence, who wish to learn about the excitement in the field. The course indtroduce a wealth of topics in AI, many of which are then subject of more specialized follow-on classes at Stanford.

This version of CS221 will also be offered online. Using some new technology, the instuctors will offer materials used in this class to online students, free of charge. It is their objective to offer identical homework assignments, quizzes, and exams in both versions of this course. Students taking the online version will therefore be graded according to the same grading criteria as students taking CS221 at Stanford. However, to receive Stanford credit, the course has to be taken through Stanford; and students have to be registered at Stanford University. Online student will only get a certificate in the name of the instructors, but no official Stanford certificate.

Course Description

This course is 10 weeks long. The in-class version starts Tue, Sept 27. The online version begins Mon, Oct 2, 2011. The course consists of

1. Approximately 20 lectures. Each lecture includes quizzes that we ask you to do, but which are not counted towards the final grade of this class. Instead, you can see the right answer to each quizz right after submitting your answers.
2. Approximately 8 homework assignments. Those are just like our quizzes, and if you do well in the quizzes, you should do well in the assignments. However, we won't show you the correct answer only with a few days delay, to discourage cheating.
3. One midterm and one final exam. These are like extended quizzes, covering all subject areas of the course discussed so far. The exams will also check your general knowledge about topics covered in the reading materials (the book).

The central objective is to teach basic methods in AI, and to convey enthusiasm for the field. AI has emerged as one of the most impactful disciplines in science and technology. Google, for example, is massively run on AI. Students passing this course should be proficient basic methods of AI, and have a broad overview of the field.q

Passing Requirements

To pass this course, you have to attend (or watch online) all lectures. You have to turn in all homework assignments and exams. We grant a total of six "late days" which can be used to turn an assignment or an exam in late.

Stanford has a strong Honor's Code. We expect you to honor this code. Violations may lead to disciplinary action against you.

Prerequisites

A solid understanding of probability and linear algebra will be required.






The class runs from Sept 26 through Dec 16, 2011. While this class is being offered online, it is also taught at Stanford University, where it continues to be a popular intro-level class on AI. For the online version, the instructors aim to offer identical materials, assignments, and exams, and to use the same grading criteria. Both instructors will be available for online discussions.

A high speed internet connection is recommended as most of the course content will be video based. Access to a copy of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is also suggested.

Sebastian Thrun is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, a Google Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academy of Sciences. Thrun is best known for his research in robotics and machine learning.

Fast Company Magazine selected him as the fifth most creative person in business, the UK Telegraph included him in their list of 100 living geniuses, and Popular Science included him in their list of Brilliant Ten. His self-driving car was named one of the 50 best inventions of 2010 by Time Magazine, and Scientific American named Thrun one of the 50 business and technology leaders. Thrun is the inaugural winner of the AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize and a recipient of the Max Planck Research Award. Thrun will be conference chair of the IJCAI 2013 conference  in Bejing, China.

Peter Norvig is Director of Research at Google Inc. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Norvig co-authored Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is the world's most popular text book on Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is used in over 1,200 universities in over 100 countries, and it has been translated into 12 languages.

Prior to joining Google, Norvig was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering.