IIT Madras and NPTEL invite applications for Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence

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 explores a variety of representation formalisms and the associated algorithms for reasoning. It starts with a simple language of propositions and moves on to first-order logic. Further, it moves to representations for reasoning about action, change, situations, and about other agents in incomplete information situations. Moreover, this course is a companion to the course “Artificial Intelligence: Search Methods for Problem Solving” that IIT Madras offered recently. The lectures for it are available online.

Who can enrol in the course?

This is an Undergraduate computer science level course. But anyone can enrol in the course. The only prerequisite is you should know have some exposure to formal languages, logic and programming. You also should have the desire to expand the horizon of your knowledge. Moreover, this course is a must-take for people willing to go into software companies dealing with knowledge and reasoning. This also includes the semantic web and semantic search.

Timeline of the course

This Elective course has a duration of 12 weeks. It will start from 18 January 2021 and end on 9 April 2021. If you want the certificate, you have to give a proctored exam on 24 April 2021. The last date to enrol is 25 January 2020.

Who will teach this Machine Learning course?

Prof. Deepak Khemani will lead the course. He 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 IIT Mandi. He has also 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.

What will the course teach?

This is an 8-week-long course. Here’s the itinerary for the course.

W1: Introduction, Propositional Logic, Syntax and Semantics
W2: Proof Systems, Natural Deduction, Tableau Method, Resolution Method
W3: First Order Logic (FOL), Syntax and Semantics, Unification, Forward Chaining
W4: The Rete Algorithm, Rete example, and also Programming Rule-Based Systems
W5: Representation in FOL, Categories and Properties, Reification, Event Calculus
W6: Deductive Retrieval, Backward Chaining, Logic Programming with Prolog
W7: Resolution Refutation in FOL, FOL with Equality, Complexity of Theorem Proving
W8: Description Logic (DL), Structure Matching, Classification
W9: Extensions of DL, The ALC Language, Inheritance in Taxonomies
W10: Default Reasoning, Circumscription, and also the Event Calculus Revisited
W11: Default Logic, Autoepistemic Logic, Epistemic Logic, Multi-Agent Scenarios

Optional Topics A: Conceptual Dependency (CD) Theory, Understanding Natural Language
Optional Topics B: Semantic Nets, Frames, Scripts, Goals and Plans

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, enrol in the course here.