Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program: What You’ll Learn
Learn essential Artificial Intelligence concepts from AI experts like Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, including search, optimization, planning, pattern recognition, and more!
What an incredible time of discovery and innovation this is! For the first time in history, we are pushing computer technology forward to the point where computers can develop abilities on par with humans — they can play complex games, accurately analyze and categorize images, and even understand spoken language.
For anyone interested in the history and future of Artificial Intelligence, the advances being made right now are simply astonishing. Best of all, more and more people are entering the field, bringing with them diverse perspectives, unique backgrounds, and powerful commitments to improving our world.
Becoming a successful Artificial Intelligence practitioner means mastering the historical foundations of the field, even as you pursue the most future-facing possibilities. Every AI expert is grounded in the same core set of skills and techniques, and it’s critical you learn these fundamentals as you build your AI career.
This is why we’ve created the Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program — so that you can learn the most important Artificial Intelligence skills and techniques used in both industry and academia.
The Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program
This is an ideal program for anyone interested in foundational AI knowledge, and it’s especially beneficial if you’re new to Artificial Intelligence, but have a working knowledge of mathematics, probability, and Python. In our new Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program, you’ll learn the right tools to turn all this knowledge into a solid foundation in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Being able to draw upon the right tool for the right challenge is so important in this field, and the last 50 years of AI research has produced dozens of key techniques that all AI experts continue to utilize. We’re thrilled to offer a program that enables you to establish your AI toolkit in just 3 months!
What You’ll Learn
The Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree Program is comprised of 7 sections.
1. Intro to Artificial Intelligence
Here you’ll meet the instructional team, including Sebastian Thrun, Peter Norvig, and Thad Starner, who will be teaching you about the foundations of AI. You’ll get acquainted with the resources available in your classroom, and gather other important information about the program. In the project, you’ll build a simple AI using Constraint Propagation and Search to solve Sudoku puzzles. You’ll extend this to solve Diagonal Sudokus, and implement advanced Sudoku strategies such as the Naked Twins strategy.
2. Constraint Satisfaction Problems
In this section, you’ll return to the techniques you used to solve Sudoku, as you explore how Constraint Satisfaction can be used to solve puzzles such as the map-coloring problem.
3. Classical Search
Here, we’ll cover Depth First Search, Breadth First Search, A* Search, and how to analyze heuristics. You’ll get a chance to build a Pac-Man AI that finds the most efficient path through its world.
4. Automated Planning
In this section, taught by Peter Norvig, you will learn how to build systems that can arrive at new, logical conclusions from a given set of facts. In particular, you’ll explore First Order Logic, Propositional Logic, and how to use such logic to solve planning problems. In the project, you’ll combine your knowledge of Logic, Planning, and Search, to implement a system that efficiently moves cargo from their origins to their destinations using the least number of flights. The system will use propositional logic to find a path to its goals given its start state and valid actions
5. Optimization Problems
In the fifth section, you’ll learn the concept of iterative improvement problems, a widely used class of optimization techniques in AI. You’ll learn about how to explore large state spaces using the biologically-inspired techniques of Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms.
6. Adversarial Search
Game playing is about teaching AI agents to act assuming a worst-case scenario — adversarial domains (ranging from Chess to Starcraft) in which other agents are directly working against your agent’s goals. Agents can make better choices when they think about consequences before they act, which is fairly straightforward in classical search, but becomes much harder when an agent has to predict how the world will change when other agents can interfere. So game playing has been a focus of AI for decades, because the real world is an adversarial domain — even the simple example of route planning is “adversarial,” given that traffic and road construction have the potential to interfere with your travel. In this section, you’ll start from the foundations of adversarial search by learning about minimax game trees, with optimizations like alpha-beta pruning, to dramatically improve results for your agent. For your project, you’ll apply these ideas in the context of the game Isolation.
7. Probabilistic Models
In this section, you’ll start by learning Probabilistic Inference to calculate the probability of certain events occurring. We’ll cover Bayesian Networks, Conditional Probability, and Bayes’ Rule. This section is taught by Sebastian Thrun. Over the course of this section, you’ll extend your knowledge of Bayesian Networks to cover Hidden Markov Models, where intermediate states can be unobserved. You’ll be able to apply this knowledge to a well-known problem in Natural Language Processing: part-of-speech tagging. In the project, you’ll build a Hidden Markov Model that, given a sentence, will be able to tag the parts of speech, such as noun and verb.
The Support You’ll Receive
Udacity offers you a wide array of support options to ensure you proceed through the program successfully. You’ll have access to an AI expert through our Classroom Mentorship program, and you’ll get detailed feedback on your project submission by one of our expert project reviewers. You’ll be able to connect with your fellow students in the classroom by using our Chat feature. And, you’ll join a Slack community where you can engage with our Community Manager, your fellow students, and even your instructors.
How to Enroll
We are now accepting new students to the Artificial Intelligence Nanodegree program.
The program is comprised of a single 3-month term. The tuition for the term will be $799, paid prior to commencing your studies.
Enroll in the program by April 17, and receive a special tuition discount!
To learn more about the program, you can explore a Free Preview (but don’t delay on enrollment, and miss your chance to save!). You’ll meet your instructors, and even explore the lessons.
The world of AI is open to everyone, and this is your invitation to join. Come learn Artificial Intelligence, and start building your future career today!
