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Announcing a New Free Curriculum: Artificial Intelligence for Beginners

It is our very great pleasure to announce the release of a new, free, MIT-licensed open-source curriculum all about Artificial Intelligence: AI for Beginners. Brought to you by a team of Azure Cloud Advocates and Microsoft Student Ambassadors led by Cloud Advocate and Professor Dmitry Soshnikov, we hope to empower all students to learn the basics of AI. This self-driven course offers a full semester of content: a free 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum, with many labs and supplemental material to dive deep into the exciting field of AI.

AI for Beginners joins our family of curricula by Microsoft:

About the Course

Despite the name "AI for Beginners", this course is not a lightweight introductory course that will give you a basic idea of what AI is or teach how to use Cognitive Services or pre-trained models. It is a full-fledged course on AI, similar to one you might take in a university. However, we tried to make it a bit more applied and less theoretical -- accessible to students without a strong mathematical background.

For Students

Students can use this curriculum to learn the basics of AI and Neural Networks. In addition to text-based lessons, there are executable Jupyter Notebooks with samples, as well as labs that you can do to deepen your knowledge. You can run notebooks either on your local computer or in the cloud. Join your peers on GitHub Discussion Boards to learn together and watch for more learning opportunities online.

For Teachers

Educators can re-use this material in class or incorporate some of the samples into their own courses. Let us know if you decide to teach with all or part of this courseware!

Contribute!

The course is open for contributions, in particular translations! Make your mark by contributing your language to the repo.

We are also open to PRs and Issue raising, following our Code of Conduct and templating systems. We hope the community will chip in with translations of the lessons, quizzes and assignments. Thank you for participating as we learn together.

Let's Learn Together

Sketchnote by Tomomi

Sketchnote by Tomomi Imura

Our curricula include:

  • a pre-lesson warmup quiz
  • a written lesson
  • knowledge checks
  • infographics, sketchnotes, and visuals
  • a challenge
  • an assignment or lab, often for both PyTorch and TensorFlow
  • a post-lesson quiz
  • opportunities to deepen your knowledge on Microsoft Learn

Topics

In this course, you'll learn

  • An overview of the AI landscape and different approaches to intelligence
  • GOFAI ("good old-fashioned AI"), symbolic reasoning and knowledge representation
  • Neural networks and Neural frameworks: TensorFlow and PyTorch
  • Computer Vision: from simple convolution networks to object detection and semantic segmentation
  • Natural Language Processing: from simple recurrent networks to modern transformer-based architectures
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning
  • Other AI techniques, such as Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Systems
  • AI Ethics

mindmap of the course

A Mindmap of the Course, image from the repo

Meet the team!

Without further ado, please meet AI For Beginners: A Curriculum!

Top comments (3)

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adalbertpungu profile image
Adalbert Pungu

Very Nice

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monicafidalgo profile image
The Coding Mermaid 🧜‍♀️

Woooowww this is amazing!!! I'm already a fan of the Web development course🙈💗 seeing more options based on market demand it's awesome! Thanks for this!

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zeroldvi profile image
zeroldvi

Thanks, very cool repos