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Stanford 'Intro To AI' Course Offered Free Online

Posted by Unknown on from the i'm-afraid-i-can't-let-you-do-that dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Stanford's CS221 course 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence' will be offered online for free. Anyone can sign up and take the course, along with several hundred Stanford undergrads. The instructors are Sebastian Thrun, known for his self-driving cars, and Peter Norvig, director of research at Google. Online students will actually have to do all the same work as the Stanford students. There will be at least 10 hours per week of studying, along with weekly graded homework assignments and midterm and final exams. The instructors, who will be available to answer questions, will issue a certificate for those who complete the course, along with a final grade that can be compared to the grades of the Stanford students. The course, which will last 10 weeks, starts on October 2nd, and online enrollment is now open." When asked how they would deal with ten thousand students, Professor Thrun replied: "We will use something akin to Google Moderator to make sure Peter and I answer the most pressing questions. Our hypothesis is that even in a class of 10,000, there will only be a fixed number of really interesting questions (like 15 per week). There exist tools to find them."

4 of 148 comments (clear)

  1. TFA is wrong by YodasEvilTwin · · Score: 3, Informative

    The actual website for the course says "The class runs from Sept 26 through Dec 16, 2011." http://www.ai-class.com/

    1. Re:TFA is wrong by daenris · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually no, the article is right. The online portion starts on October 2nd. If you look at the course website, under Course Description it makes this clear.

  2. Re:Sounds... awesome... by Enderandrew · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm
    http://www.wikipedia.org/
    http://www.khanacademy.org/
    http://www.ted.com/

    Standford isn't first to this game, but I still applaud them.

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  3. Re:Not what you think by Osgeld · · Score: 2, Informative

    CS221 is the introductory course into the field of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. It covers basic elements of AI, such as knowledge representation, inference, machine learning, planning and game playing, information retrieval, and computer vision and robotics. CS221 is a broad course aimed to teach students the very basics of modern AI. It is prerequisite to many other, more specialized AI classes at Stanford University.

    sounds like electronic human brains is the goal to me