There's a new free, self-paced, online course about Artificial Intelligence from Microsoft's Azure Cloud Advocates. Its 24 lesson curriculum, expected to take 12 weeks to complete, is targeted at those brand new to Artificial Intelligence.

This is a continuation of last year's Microsoft's Machine Learning for Beginners.That course made a clear distinction between Machine Learning and AI - it was about "classic machine learning" and did not concern itself with artificial intelligence. That is the job of its sibling course, AI for Beginners.This separation of topics meant that ML for Beginners was not as complicated as AI for Beginners is, well at the novice level anyway.

Both courses require Python. ML uses Sci-kit and with good reason :

Python certainly is the most popular language of doing ML, mainly due to the number of relevant libraries available. scikit-learn is one of the top Machine Learning libraries alongside PyTorch, NumPy, SciPy, TensorFlow and Theano.

Additionally, scikit-learn is one of the easiest to learn as such perfect for beginning one's ML journey. That doesn't mean that it lacks functionality though; it is perfectly capable of pulling off many ML tasks such as classification, clustering, pre-processing, regression, etc.

AI on the other hand, uses what ML doesn't - that is it demonstrates Neural Networks and Deep Learning with TensorFlow and PyTorch. So at the higher level, the curriculum is comprised of:

• Different approaches to Artificial Intelligence, including the "good old" symbolic approach with Knowledge Representation and reasoning (GOFAI)
  
  
• Neural Networks and Deep Learning, as said with TensorFlow and PyTorch
  
  
• Neural Architectures for working with images and text
  
  
• Less popular AI approaches, such as Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Systems

That overview in detail translates to :

• Introduction to AI
    Introduction and History of AI
• Symbolic AI
    Knowledge Representation and Expert Systems
• Introduction to Neural Networks
    Perceptron
    Multi-Layered Perceptron and Creating our own
• Framework
    Intro to Frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow)
    Computer Vision
    Microsoft Learn Module on Computer Vision
    Intro to Computer Vision. OpenCV
    Convolutional Neural Networks
    Pre-trained Networks and Transfer Learning
    Autoencoders and VAEs
    Generative Adversarial Networks
    Artistic Style Transfer
    Object Detection
    Semantic Segmentation. U-Net
• Natural Language Processing
    Microsoft Learn Module on Natural Language
    Text Representation. Bow/TF-IDF
    Semantic word embeddings. Word2Vec and GloVe
    Language Modeling. Training your own embeddings
    Recurrent Neural Networks
    Generative Recurrent Networks
    Transformers. BERT.
    Named Entity Recognition
    Large Language Models, Prompt Programming and Few- 
    Shot Tasks
• Other AI Techniques
    Genetic Algorithms
    Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Multi-Agent Systems
• AI Ethics
    AI Ethics and Responsible AI
• Extras
    Multi-Modal Networks, CLIP and VQGAN

Like its ML predecessor, it is carefully planned and well structured. It includes quizzes, doodles, assignments, projects, group discussions and some executable Jupyter Notebooks, which are often specific to the framework (PyTorch or TensorFlow).

And, in my opinion,  it's quite complete and perfectly addressed to CS students as a side-dish to their classes or for those having touched the subject at college and are looking to expand more under the scope of a Masters degree or of finding a job.

Microsoft with its three part series, Data Science, ML and Al, all for beginners, has managed to cover those closely interrelated fields, giving a holistic education to those interested. In the current job landscape these fields could be used in isolation or in combination. The three-part series has every case covered.

And,of course here at I Programmer we have a keen interest in anything to do with Data/ML/AI as well as the topic of Ethics and as such we highlight many relevant educational resources. You'll find some of those at the end of this article.

If until now you were finding it confusing as to how to get started in the science of AI, then confusion begone. AI for beginners is the perfect place to start from.

More Information

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence for Beginners

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