Driven by recent breakthroughs, rapidly growing collections of data, and a plethora of exciting applications, artificial intelligence is experiencing massive interest and investment from both the academic and industrial scene.

This course selects a number of advanced topics to explore in machine learning and autonomous agents. Although these topics are diverse and extensive, this course is developed around a common thread connecting them all, such that each topic builds off the others.

Lectures will cover the relevant theory, and labs will familiarize the students with these topics from a practical point of view. Several of the lab assignments will be graded, and a team project on reinforcement learning will form a major component of the grade - where the goal is to developing and deploy an agent in an environment and write a report analyzing the results.