• Explain and analyze the key ideas and techniques underlying Artificial Intelligence technologies, including basic approaches to Machine Learning
• Critically evaluate and compare the development and impact of Artificial Intelligence technologies in different business areas
• Identify and analyze a specific problem which can be addressed by new Artificial Intelligence techniques

This course examines new Artificial Intelligence technologies that are rapidly transforming the digital marketplace. One highly publicized example is Watson, IBM’s intelligent question-answering system that won the game show Jeopardy! Another high-profile example is Google Translate, which now translates more text than all the world’s human translators. A few short years ago Artificial Intelligence technology was primarily relegated to the realm of fantasy and science fiction – now it is driving new businesses and technologies in a wide range of areas, such as e-discovery, sentiment analysis, topic tracking, and summarization. We will see that the sudden emergence of successful AI systems involves two key factors: the application of massive computing power, and leveraging the wisdom of crowds.
  
Facebook, Twitter and similar services are generating an enormous amount of data, covering every imaginable topic in thousands of different languages and styles. Artificial Intelligence is the key that can unlock the information in these massive unstructured collections of data. Students will get hands-on experience with newly developed tools for doing this. We will look at how AI technology is central to the strategies of IT Giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and IBM – and we will look at speculation about how these developments may well accelerate in the near future. A key point is that AI technologies are becoming widely available, with public descriptions and open-source implementations. This means that they are no longer the province of large powerful companies, and we will see how AI technologies are playing an increasingly important role now for many small companies. Students will have an opportunity with hands-on exercises to learn how to access and deploy many of the leading technologies.
 

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Pang and Lee (2008) Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 2.
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