cs415 Artificial Intelligence
Spring 2012 Monday Wednesday 6-7:15 Trinkle B6
Lab instructor: Ron Zacharski // gmail: ron.zacharski // cell: 575 680-4041
Office Hours: Wednesday 11-2; Friday 10-12
Ok, the hours of this class are not ideal — Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 to 7:15pm. Plus, what is the deal with listing myself as “lab instructor” And what is the scoop with the above logo? “In partnership with Stanford Engineering”? I ripped off a logo from a Stanford class and didn’t bother to photoshop the Stanford bit out of the image? (Ok that is true.) This doesn’t look good.
What’s the scoop?
Glad you asked. First, the lectures for the class are not at 6 at night; they are exactly at the time you want them. You see, I am turning the class on its heels (or should it be head?). Instead of listening to lectures in class at 6pm you will be watching the lectures online–lectures given by two amazing people.
First is Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, Inc. He co-wrote (with Stuart Russell) the leading textbook in Artificial Intelligence, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.” It is the textbook we are using for this class and is the 2nd most cited publication of this century. Before Google he was NASA’s senior computer scientist. His “Paradigms of AI Programming” book has been called “the best book on programming ever written.
The other lecturer is Sebastian Thrun, a Research Professor at Stanford. He lead the development of the robotic vehicle, Stanley, which won the DARPA challenge/race to drive a 150 mile mountainous course. He also lead the development of Google’s driverless car. He was named by Fast Company as the Fifth most creative business person.
So online lectures by two amazing people and you can watch them when you want.
So what do we do in class? First, there will be weekly brief quizzes to give you a little incentive to watch the videos. But most of the time we will be working on a series of Python projects related to the videos. So doing programming from 6pm to 7:15 — I hope that doesn’t sound too bad to you.
I anticipate the class to be fairly challenging, but we should have fun.