IIT Madras to Offer Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence Soon on NPTEL

IIT Madras has announced that it will soon make a 12-week free online course on artificial intelligence available on the NPTEL platform. The course called “Artificial Intelligence Course on Search Methods for Problem-solving” has been offered on the NPTEL platform earlier as well. “IIT Madras along with NPTEL India is offering a free online course on 'Artificial Intelligence Search Methods for Problem Solving', led by Prof Deepak Khemani, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras. Enrollment soon,” said an official tweet from the institute.

The course, as mentioned before, will be conducted by Prof Deepak Khemani who is a professor at the department of computer science and engineering at the Institute. He completed his BTech in mechanical engineering, and MTech and PhD in computer science from IIT Bombay, and has been with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras ever since. The program is an All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) approved FDP course.

What the IIT Madras Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence Will Cover?

The course will cover the following aspects of artificial intelligence over a period of 12 weeks:

• Introduction: History, Can Machines think? Turing Test, Winograd Schema Challenge, Language and Thought, Wheels and Gears.
• Introduction: Philosophy, Mind, Reasoning, Computation, Dartmouth Conference, The Chess Saga, Epiphenomena.
• State Space Search: Depth First Search, Breadth First Search, Depth First Iterative Deepening.
• Heuristic Search: Best First Search, Hill Climbing, Solution Space, TSP, Escaping Local Optima, Stochastic Local Search.
• Population Based Methods: Genetic Algorithms, SAT, TSP, emergent Systems, Ant Colony Optimization.
• Finding Optimal Paths: Branch and Bound, A, Admissibility of A, Informed Heuristic Functions.
• Space Saving Versions of A: Weighted A, IDA, RBFS, Monotone Condition, Sequence Alignment, DCFS, SMGS, Beam Stack Search.
• Game Playing: Game Theory, Board Games and Game Trees, Algorithm Minimax, AlphaBeta and SSS.
• Automated Planning: Domain-Independent Planning, Blocks World, Forward and backward Search, Goal Stack Planning, Plan Space Planning.
• Problem Decomposition: Means Ends Analysis, Algorithm Graphplan, Algorithm AO.
• Rule-Based Expert Systems: Production Systems, Inference Engine, Match-Resolve-Execute, Rete Net.
• Deduction as Search: Logic, Soundness, Completeness, First Order Logic, Forward Chaining, Backward Chaining.
• Constraint Processing: CSPs, Consistency Based Diagnosis, Algorithm Backtracking, Arc Consistency, Algorithm Forward Checking.

Who Can Apply for the IIT Madras Free Online Course?

The course is open to computer science and engineering students as well as anyone comfortable with the language of algorithms. Participants who successfully complete courses on NPTEL and clear examinations are also given a certificate with logos of IIT Madras and NPTEL. More details on the date of joining will be updated once it is revealed by the institute.