Sixth Module : Artificial Intelligence

This module is about one of my most favourite area of interest: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Before the lesson began, I am excited that we will be using the famous AI text for our lectures, “Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach.” The text is written by top Computer Scientist in the AI arena, Peter Norvig, who currently works at Google and Stuart Russell, who currently is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, USA. The lecturer is Dr. Tat-Jun Chin, who also is involves in research in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. The first half of the lecture class focus on search and game playing. Algorithms such as Best-first search, Greedy search, Uniform Cost Search, Mini-max and Alpha Beta Pruning are all being covered. There is also a discussion on heuristic strategies, enabling optimal search solutions. There are some topics on machine learning such as decision trees, classification using K-Nearest Neighbours algorithms etc. The second half of the lectures involve statistics and robotics. Bayesian network and Monte-Carlo simulation are being taught as well. The Robotics portion involves robot localisation using the partially observed markov decision process and other related algorithms. I think in this period of time where artificial intelligence and machine learning is getting very popular, I would strongly recommend taking this module.

Fifth Module: Advance Programming Paradigms

In this module, we learned about functional programming. The assignments are based on the Scheme Language. We have to use the software, “Dr. Racket” to complete the assignments. We also learned about the different parallelism strategies such as Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) and Map-Reduce. We also have to make a video based on a functional language of our choice and its usage in the industry. We chose Haskell and did some research on it.

The text for this module is “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.” The text is very well known text in academia for teaching functional programming. MIT open courseware has some lecture videos from a module that teaches this text. The language they used is Lisp, which Scheme is a dialect of.

The lecturer for this module is Dr. Andrew Wendelborn.