Reading 01: k-Nearest Neighbors + Decision Trees

Welcome to CSE 30124 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which (as the syllabus states) is a broad introduction to the field of artificial intelligence. We will begin the semester with high-dimensional data and foundational machine-learning methods, then build toward deep learning and modern generative models. At the end of the semester, we will loop back to broader ideas about intelligent systems.

TL;DR

For this week, decide how you will run the notebook software used in this course, complete the assigned readings, and then submit your first reading quiz.

Course Overview

Artificial Intelligence is an extremely broad field and while no doubt all of you will be familiar with some aspects of it, likely the GPT family, these tools are only a small subset of what the field encompasses as a whole.

We will begin the course at the top of the circle and work our way down. However at the end of the semester and the bottom of the circles we will find that we start to wrap back around again to the top.

Task 1: Notebooks

Please at least skim all four, but for the purposes of this course you just need to get one of the methods working to run your notebooks. Notebooks can be run locally through something like VSCode, and this is what I recommend and use. If you have other methods, please feel free to reach out to your me to discuss them.

Task 2: Reading

Syllabus: CSE 30124 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Most weeks you will have a reading assignment followed by a brief quiz that will cover the two upcoming lectures. Each of the two will have a primary reading and then a link to a number of additional resources that I encourage you to explore if you're interested. Once completing the readings, use the link below to access the canvas quiz. Quizzes are due at 3:00 PM on the day of the first lecture for the topic.

Note: We will be a little lenient on this first reading quiz.
Note: Most of the readings are significantly more in depth than what you will need to answer the quizzes. It's completely fine if you skim portions (especially the ones full of equations (yuck)), these are merely meant to prepare you for the lectures so you at least have some familiarity with the material (and they allow me to shift some of the exam points to the quizzes, which are hopefully less stressful).

Topics

k-Nearest Neighbors

Readings

Videos

Notebooks

Blogposts

Decision Trees

Readings

Videos

Notebooks

Blogposts

Papers

Task 3: Quiz

Please respond to the quiz below. You may edit your responses after each submission, so there's really no reason you shouldn't get full credit on these!

Access the quiz here