AI-1

Arya Mohan

• Arya is working as a research and teaching fellow with Univ.AI.
• Previously, she was a data analyst at Schneider Electric.
• She is currently working as a research fellow at the StellarDNN lab.

Shibani Budhraja

• A Psychologist and amateur musician exploring the world of Data Science.
• Her current and future goals include working towards mastering Reinforcement Learning along with exploring ethics and biases in AI.
• Her previous occupations have included a few hospital internships under neuropsychologists and psychiatrists , teaching at a NGO for young girls and thereafter teaching kids with special needs.

Hemani Shah

• Hemani is a Machine Learning Enthusiast, currently a final year undergrad at Gujarat Technological University.
• She previously volunteered for a Non-Profit organization called TEDxGoldenBridge.
• She can be found reading novels in her free time.

Lakshay Chawla

• Lakshay is a final year CSE undergrad at MAIT, Delhi.
• Eventual goals include unravelling the mysteries of deep space with the help of ever-evolving AI.
• You might find him engrossed in music and never-ending thoughts if not working for the future.

Abjasree S

• Currently, Direct Entry diploma in Data Science student at IIT Madras.
• Completed Masters in Physics from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Tirupati.
• Looks forward to learning how to use AI and its application in various physics problems and other research fields, especially image processing.
• In her free time, she can be found watching anime or drawing anime characters.

Statistics. Math. Computer Science. Physics. Long ago, the four disciplines lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Computer Science attacked. Only a master of all four elements, could stop them, but when the world needed it most, it was not invented. A few years ago the world discovered the new master, a scientist called data scientist, a master of all four elements.

Welcome to AI-1. The objective of this module is to provide fundamental understandings of machine learning models and get you working with the basic concepts of ML and AI.

You will start with the basic regression models (KNN, Linear, Multi, Poly), classification models (kNN, Logistic) and then move on to more advanced concepts like Bagging and Boosting. Along the way, you will operationalize the key concepts of machine learning: picking the right complexity, preventing overfitting, regularization, and model evaluation.

At the end of this module, you will be able to run basic and advanced machine learning models, and tell how well they are performing.

This page introduces you to the team, the basic instructions, the schedule and various elements of our class.

The Team

Dr. Pavlos Protopapas

• Scientific Director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS).
• Teaches Introduction to Data Science (CS109a), Advanced Topics in Data Science (CS109b) and Advanced Practical Data Science (AC215).
• He is a leader in astrostatistics and he is excited about the new telescopes coming online in the next few years.

You can read more about him here.

Teaching Assistants

Coming Soon!

The Coursework

We have very carefully designed the coursework to give you, the student, a wholesome learning experience.

Each week shall include:

• 2 Sessions
• 2 Labs
• Office hours

Session - What to expect

The course includes two 1.5 hour sessions per week. Before the session begins, students are expected to complete a pre-class reading assignment and and attempt a quiz based on the same.

A session will have the following pedagogy layout which will be repeated three times:

• Approx. 15 minutes of live online instruction followed by approx 15 minutes of Q/A + Quiz + Exercises.
• Sessions will help students develop the intuition for the core concepts, provide the necessary mathematical background, and provide guidance on technical details.
• Sessions will be accompanied by relevant examples to clarify key concepts and techniques.

After the session, students are expected to complete a short post-class quiz based on the principal concepts covered in class.

Lab - What to expect

A lab is a TA driven 1.5 hour session that is divided into 3 major parts.

• Each lab begins by revisiting the quizzes and exercises done in the previous lecture session.

• After discussing exercises, we will have a semi-formal Q/A session. All doubts pertaining, but not limited, to the previous session, and homeworks are welcome.

• The last part of the labs deals predominantly with the upcoming homeworks. It is directed towards giving a brief overview of the homework problem. We will discuss some code to help you get started.

Course Content

The Class

Coming Soon!

Course Pre-Requisites

Your are expected to have a working knowledge of python, along with these three libraries:

• Numpy
• Pandas
• Matplotlib

All exercises in this course will be done in jupyter notebooks.

Note: No prior knowledge of machine learning libraries is necessary for this module

In addition to this, you are expected to know the material covered in our AI0 course.

Before you begin the course, we have prepared for you a simple exercise to ensure your proficieny of the above libraries.

This will help you assess your preparedness for the course, and will also help you familiarize yourself with the platform.

Please find a more detailed summary of the pre-requisites for this program here.

Diversity & Inclusion

We actively seek and welcome people of diverse identities, from across the spectrum of disciplines and methods since Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly mediates our social, cultural, economic, and political interactions [1].

We believe in creating and maintaining an inclusive learning environment where all members feel safe, respected, and capable of producing their best work.

We commit to an experience for all participants that is free from – Harassment, bullying, and discrimination which includes but is not limited to:

• Offensive comments related to age, race, religion, creed, color, gender (including transgender/gender identity/gender expression), sexual orientation, medical condition, physical or intellectual disability, pregnancy, or medical conditions, national origin or ancestry.
• Intimidation, personal attacks, harassment, unnecessary disruption of talks during any of the learning activities.

Reference:

[1] K. Stathoulopoulos and J. C. Mateos-Garcia, “Gender Diversity in AI Research,” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019 [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3428240.

Logistics - What you need to begin?

We assume you have a Univ.AI account, created when you signed up at course.univ.ai. If not, email programs@univ.ai.

Education software we use

• Our lectures and labs are carried out via Zoom (install instructions).
• Quizzes & exercises will be conducted on the digital learning platform Ed.
• Ocassionally, we may conduct in-class contests on kaggle. Please register on kaggle and familarize yourself with it, if you haven’t already done so. This is a short video that will help you learn how to use kaggle.

All exercises and homeworks in this course will be done in jupyter notebooks. This link will help you setup jupyter lab and get you acquianted with jupyter notebooks.

Our module policies around collaboration and grading are listed here. Our expectations of you are also laid out in that document.

Parting note

As you will learn in this course, data science is not just about writing efficient algorithms.

It requires proficiency in critical thinking, ideation & presentation, along with strong foundations in statistics, computer science & mathematics.

Keeping that in mind, you are adviced to give your full active attention to every session, homework & exercise.

We wish you best of luck for your data science journey.

Links to previous cohorts

• Cohort 1
• Cohort 2
• Cohort 3
• Cohort 4
• Cohort 5