Artificial Intelligence Planning
Link:
https://www.coursera.org/course/aiplan
Institution:
The University of Edinburgh
Instructors:
Gerhard Wickler, Austin Tate
Although I could not spend much time on this course, I managed to complete the Awareness Level of the course (rather the Foundation Level and Performance Level, which required more commitment to the course). Below are two badges I got from this course (I like to collect badges).
Badge awarded to all participants who start the MOOC.
Badge awarded to all participants who successfully complete the MOOC at the Awareness Level.
The requirements for the Awareness Level were watching certain videos and completing the final exam for the Awareness Level. For the Foundation Level, one had to take the final exams for the Awareness Level and for the Foundation Level. Both the levels had their own minimum marks to pass. As for the Performance Level, one had to take both the final exams and choose from two programming assignments and one creative challenge to pass the required minimum marks.
The videos included "Feature" videos and typical lecture videos. The Feature videos introduced Artificial Intelligence (AI) Planning's history and applications. These did not have much technical detail and were suitable for people of little technical background. For those who did not intend to get a certificate, simply watching the Feature videos might be good enough.
The lecture videos contained much more technical stuff, including algorithm introduction and pseudocode. Even for the Awareness Level, one had to watch some of these. These help with the programming assignments. The instructors' voice was clear, and they paused appropriately. It was easy to listen even without the pause function and subtitles of the video.
The programming assignments were based on the lectures and did not have tricky problems. One simply had to make use of the algorithms and concepts learned. I managed to complete the first one when I had time. I did not take much time.
The creative challenge is flexible, but most people who completed chose to introduce fields where AI planning is used and technology related to AI planning. Their works were linked on discussion forums. It was interesting to browse through the classmates' projects. I thought of introducing AI planning for image processing, which has been researched more than 15 years (I do not know exactly how long the history of this field is), but was unable to allocate time for this.
After the 3rd week of the course was a break week, which was very useful for busy people to catch up. Without this break week, I would have had no time to complete even the first programming assignment.
On Twitter, the course had its tag #aiplan, and there were many updates and tweets about the course, by the course team or students. The course team handle is @aiplanner.
In general, the course difficulty was just right in my opinion. Maybe it is because the instructors were not trying to give the students hard time. The variety of resources (such as reference readings) was good. The discussion on the forum was good, too. The creative challenge works by other students were among my favorite about the course.
The course will start again in 2015. Maybe I will take it again to reach a higher level.
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