Welcome to the exciting world of Machine Learning! Did you know that the best Backgammon players in the world are computers? Furthermore, did you know that no human taught them to play, that instead they taught themselves!

This course is about machine learning with emphasis on artificial neural networks (ANN). We examine a number of learning paradigms and demonstrate how to implement and where best to apply a number of ANN techniques such as Error-Backpropagation, Hopfield Nets and the Self Organising Feature Map. The course is quite practical in nature and by the end you will have learned how to build your own learning agent! We will also cover Reinforcement Learning (RL) and see how it can be combined with neural networks to build a powerful AI. To provide context, these approaches are compared with more traditional forms of machine learning.

If you have an interest in AI and machine learning, this course will be of interest to you.

(c) Sarbjit Sarkaria 17-October-2021