Course summary

AI significantly affects people’s lives, and it is encountered in more and more of our daily activities. These include activities such as using smart devices, digital voice assistants, and travel aids, as well as banking online or receiving personalised recommendations about movies to rent. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly reliant on leveraging the widespread availability of (often very large) datasets that encode relationships between data inputs to decision making processes, and the outcome of these processes, so that AI applications can enhance human decision making in a wide variety of everyday tasks (e.g. recommender systems) and specialised tasks (e.g. deciding on legal litigation risks, decisions in business/logistics planning, or decisions based on interpretation of visual data such as diagnostic scans in medicine), as well as AI applications that autonomously make and implement decisions (e.g. robots that need to sense their environment and plan actions). These applications require expertise in a broad range of Artificial Intelligence areas. The MSci in Artificial Intelligence will allow you to understand the underlying principles of these areas, including:

• Foundations of AI (e.g. programming, discrete mathematics, algorithm design)

• Data Science and Machine Learning (e.g. natural language processing, human-AI interaction)

• Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Interactions (e.g. data visualisation, knowledge engineering, formal verification)

• Optimisation, Planning and Autonomous Agents (e.g. autonomous robot programming, logic, network optimisation)

• Ethics and philosophy of AI (e.g., legal, social, ethical and professional issues in AI and in robotics system development, philosophical work on the impact and on dangers of AI)

• AI Engineering (e.g. internet and web systems, cloud-based services, AI security and privacy)