IIT Madras invites applications for Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence via NPTEL

IIT Madras has organised this course while keeping in mind the value of AI to all. According to IIT Madras, 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. Thus, in this course, IIT Madras explores a variety of representation formalisms and the associated algorithms for reasoning.

The course starts with a simple language of propositions and moves on to first-order logic. Later, it moves to representations for reasoning about action, change, situations, and about other agents in incomplete information situations. Further, this course is a companion to the course “Artificial Intelligence: Search Methods for Problem Solving”, the lectures for which are available online.

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 from 18 January 2021 and end on 09 April 2021. If you want the certificate, you have to give a proctored exam on 25 April 2021. The last date to enrol is 25 January 2020.

Who will teach this course?

Deepak Khemani is Professor at 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.

What will the course teach?

This is a 12-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, Programming Rule-Based Systems

W5: Representation in FOL; also Categories and Properties, Reification, Event Calculus

W6: Deductive Retrieval, Backward Chaining, Logic Programming with Prolog

W7: Resolution Refutation in FOL; further, FOL with Equality, Complexity of Theorem Proving

W8: Description Logic (DL), Structure Matching, Classification

W9: Extensions of DL, The ALC Language, also Inheritance in Taxonomies

W10: Default Reasoning, Circumscription, The Event Calculus Revisited

W11: Default Logic, Autoepistemic Logic, Epistemic Logic, Multi-Agent Scenarios

Optional Topics A: Conceptual Dependency (CD) Theory, also 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, you can enrol in the course here.