Overview
One reason I am intrigued by artificial intelligence is the necessity
to think about the nature of thinking. About the only thing that
is cooler than that is learning how learning takes place. When
we focus on computational mechanisms that model and exhibit learning,
we call that machine learning.
This topics course will survey the range of methods that allow us to
write programs that improve their performance as a result of experience
(i.e., learn).
The course will be organized as a seminar with some small project
components. Students will give multiple presentations on material from
the text or other assigned readings. They will also implement some of
the techniques we will be studying and demonstrate the systems'
learning behavior in code walks and demonstrations using real-world data sets.