The goal of this course is to provide students knowledge of the basics of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The course focuses on AI relevant for the humanities and useful for cultural heritage institutions, such as Sound and Vision, the Dutch institute for media culture. The course is designed for students who do not have a background in math or computer science. After this course, students will be able to describe the historic roots of AI (e.g., Symbolic vs. Subsymbolic AI and AI winter vs. AI spring), the concepts underlying AI algorithms (e.g., perceptrons and convolutional neural networks), the facets of AI systems (Rationale, Operations, Data, Enrichment, and Output), and the shortcomings of AI (e.g., unpredictable errors, bias, and lack of transparency). They will be able to put their knowledge into action to propose an AI system that can address the needs of users of cultural heritage archives.
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The course presents an introduction to AI (especially machine-learning-based AI) and its practical application in domains related to the humanities. Today, we use AI, such as computer vision and speech recognition, increasingly frequently on our smartphones and laptops. However, the potential of AI goes beyond commercial products and services and extends to supporting us in understanding culture and communication. This course allows students to explore that potential.
The course covers the roots of AI, fundamentals of AI algorithms, facets of AI systems, and the limitations of AI. The focus is technology that is related to language and communication, e.g., information retrieval, automatic image understanding, natural language processing, and automatic speech recognition. Students gain practical knowledge via a series of case studies in which they learn about the missions of different cultural heritage archives, and how AI can be used to support these missions. Students strengthen their knowledge in a project in which they propose an AI system that can support users of cultural heritage archives.
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Performance in the course is assessed on the basis of three components: course assignments, a written exam, and a project. The assignments are pass/fail. It is necessary to pass all assignments to pass the course. Given that the assignments have been successfully passed, the grade is the average of the written exam grade and the project grade. It is not possible to carry over individual course components to future years.
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