Artificial Intelligence for Beginners – new Microsoft learning course

Azure Cloud Advocates at Microsoft are pleased to offer a 12-week, 24-lesson curriculum all about Artificial Intelligence.

In this curriculum, you will learn:

• Different approaches to Artificial Intelligence, including the “good old” symbolic approach with Knowledge Representation and reasoning (GOFAI).
• Neural Networks and Deep Learning, which are at the core of modern AI. We will illustrate the concepts behind these important topics using code in two of the most popular frameworks – TensorFlow and PyTorch.
• Neural Architectures for working with images and text. We will cover recent models but may lack a little bit on the state-of-the-art.
• Less popular AI approaches, such as Genetic Algorithms and Multi-Agent Systems.

What we will not cover in this curriculum:

• Business cases of using AI in Business. Consider taking Introduction to AI for business users learning path on Microsoft Learn, or AI Business School, developed in cooperation with INSEAD.
• Classic Machine Learning, which is well described in our Machine Learning for Beginners Curriculum
• Practical AI applications built using Cognitive Services. For this, we recommend that you start with modules Microsoft Learn for vision, natural language processing and others.
• Specific ML Cloud Frameworks, such as Azure Machine Learning or Azure Databricks. Consider using Build and operate machine learning solutions with Azure Machine Learning and Build and Operate Machine Learning Solutions with Azure Databricks learning paths.
• Conversational AI and Chat Bots. There is a separate Create conversational AI solutions learning path, and you can also refer to this blog post for more detail.
• Deep Mathematics behind deep learning. For this, we would recommend Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, which is also available online at https://www.deeplearningbook.org/.

For a gentle introduction to AI in the Cloud topics you may consider taking the Get started with artificial intelligence on Azure Learning Path.

Artificial Intelligence for Beginners

Mindmap of the Course

Each lesson contains some pre-reading material (linked as Text above), and some executable Jupyter Notebooks, which are often specific to the framework (PyTorch or TensorFlow). The executable notebook also contains a lot of theoretical material, so to understand the topic you need to go through at least one version of the notebooks (either PyTorch or TensorFlow). There are also Labs available for some topics, which give you an opportunity to try applying the material you have learned to a specific problem.

Some sections also contain links to MS Learn modules that cover related topics. Microsoft Learn provides a convenient GPU-enabled learning environment, although in terms of content you can expect this curriculum to go a bit deeper.

Getting Started

Students, there are a couple of ways to use the curriculum. First of all, you can just read the text and look through the code directly on GitHub. If you want to run the code in any of the notebooks – read our instructions, and find more advice on how to do it in this blog post.

Note: Instructions on how to run the code in this curriculum

However, if you would like to take the course as a self-study project, we suggest that you fork the entire repo to your own GitHub account and complete the exercises on your own or with a group:

• Start with a pre-lecture quiz
• Read the intro text for the lecture
• If the lecture has additional notebooks, go through them, reading and executing the code. If both TensorFlow and PyTorch notebooks are provided, you can focus on one of them – chose your favorite framework
• Notebooks often contain some of the challenges that require you to tweak the code a little bit to experiment
• Take the post-lecture quiz
• If there is a lab attached to the module – complete the assignment
• Visit the Discussion board to “learn out loud”.
• Chat with other learners on Gitter or in Telegram channel.

For further study, we recommend following these Microsoft Learn modules and learning paths.

Teachers, we have included some suggestions on how to use this curriculum.

Artificial Intelligence for Beginners on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/ai-for-beginners
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