The course runs over 6 weeks and is broken down into manageable weekly topics:
Week 1: Introduction to AI
- What AI is and its main classes of applications and capabilities
- The differences between different types of AI technologies
- Core technologies associated with AI
- The relationship between AI and other technology trends such as big data, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT)
- The role of data in AI
- The challenges in applying AI within organisations
- The limitations of AI
Week 2: Case study – Learning to know your customers
- The difference between supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms
- Fundamental classes of machine-learning, including regression, classification and clustering
- Types of business problems machine-learning can solve and machine-learning tasks that can be used to solve them
- Activities and technologies used to build a Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline
- Statistical processing and work distributions
- Applying regression, classification, and clustering to extract information and recommend items to purchase
- Analysis, assessment and interpretation of the results of machine-learning models
Week 3: Case study – Enhancing the customer experience
- The Turing test and how it can be used to improve AI systems
- Important methods and technologies in natural language generation
- Deep-learning approaches to NLP and what they’re used for
- Important methods and tools in natural language understanding and speech recognition
- Designing conversational agents (i.e. chatbots)
Week 4: Case study – Search and recommendation
- Clustering algorithms
- Topic modelling
- Knowledge bases: How are they built? What purpose do they serve?
- Using a knowledge base for Named Entity Recognition (NER)
- Introduction to the semantic web
- Using the knowledge base to extract relevant information (i.e. SPARQL and Google Knowledge Graph)
Week 5: Case study – Computer vision
- Traditional approaches to image-processing and computer vision
- Image classification and clustering
- Feature extraction
- Convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
- Combining CNNs with conversational agents to generate textual descriptions
- Systems for automatic surveillance
Week 6: Future directions for AI
- Current limitations
- Technological advances
- Societal and cultural shifts
- Ethical, moral and legal issues
After successfully completing the course, you’ll be able to:
- Understand what AI technology is, its capabilities and limitations, and the potential benefits it can bring to your business
- Identify AI’s main capabilities and the relevant technologies needed to deliver them
- Explain the different components needed to deliver complex AI systems
- Discuss the ethical, moral and legal implications of AI in various areas of today’s society
- Identify different types and applications of data in delivering effective AI solutions
- Identify various software that can be used to process, analyse, and draw meaning from natural language as well as from images and numerical data – enabling deeper insights