IIT Madras offers Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence via NPTEL

IIT Madras has organised this course while keeping in mind the growing usage of Artificial Intelligence in every industry. IIT Madras states that an intelligent agent needs to be able to solve problems in its world. The ability to create representations of the domain of interest and reason with these representations is key to intelligence.

In this course, IIT Madras states that for an autonomous agent to behave intelligently it must be able to solve problems. This means it should be able to arrive at decisions that transform a given situation into a desired or goal situation. The agent should also be able to imagine the consequence of its decisions; thus, identify the ones that work. This course studies a wide variety of search methods that agents can employ for problem-solving.

It is also a companion to the course “Artificial Intelligence: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning” that IIT Madras offered recently.

Who can enrol in the course?

This is an Undergraduate computer science level course for BE/ME/MS/MSc/PhD students. But anyone can enrol in the course. The only prerequisite is you should have some exposure to formal languages, logic and programming.

Timeline of the course

This Elective course has a duration of 12 weeks. It will start on 26 July 2021 and end on 15 October 2021. If you want the certificate, you have to give a proctored exam on 23 October 2021. The last date to enrol is 02 August 2021.

Who will teach this course?

Deepak Khemani is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras. He completed his B.Tech. (1980) in Mechanical Engineering, and M.Tech. (1983) and PhD. (1989) in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, and has been with IIT Madras since then. In between, he spent a year at Tata Research Development and Design Centre, Pune and another at the youngest IIT at Mandi. He has had shorter stays at several Computing departments in Europe. Prof Khemani’s long-term goals are to build articulate problem-solving systems using AI that can interact with human beings. His research interests include Memory-Based Reasoning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Planning and Constraint Satisfaction, Qualitative Reasoning and Natural Language Processing.

How to obtain a certificate from IIT Madras?

The course is free to enrol and learn. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and write the optional proctored exam. The fee for this exam is ₹ 1000. Also, the successful completion of the exam does not guarantee a certificate. To get a certificate, you need to get 25% from the assignments and 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100.

Final score = Average assignment score (>10/25) + Exam score (>30/75). If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will still not get the certificate even if the Final score > 40/100.

This printable certificate will carry the stamp from both NPTEL and IIT Madras. Further, you can enrol in the course here.