IIT Kharagpur Announces Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for Students

IIT Kharagpur is offering a free online course on artificial intelligence and machine learning for interested students on the SWAYAM NPTEL platform. The course called Applied Linear Algebra in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning aims at providing insights on the mathematical foundations of linear algebra, optimization techniques and statistical methods, which are essential tools for most of the algorithms in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The course will be conducted by professor Swanand Khare who has an MSc and Phd from IIT Bombay. He currently works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and jointly in the Centre of Excellence in Al at IIT Kharagpur. He is a recipient of Excellent Young Teacher Award 2018 from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. 

Who Can Take the IIT Kharagpur Free Online Course?

While the course can be taken up by anyone who is interested, it would be most beneficial for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students from the following domains as it also carries three credit points:

• Computer science and engineering.
• Electrical engineering.
• Electronics and communication engineering.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Mathematics.

The official page mentions that participants will need to have completed a course on engineering mathematics with some exposure to linear algebra in order to understand this course.

What the IIT Kharagpur Free Online Course Will Cover?

The course aims at helping participants of the course to take on advanced study or research in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning by helping them build a strong mathematical foundation through the introduction of the following topics:

• Vectors, operations on vectors, vector spaces and subspaces, inner product and vector norm, linear dependence and independence, matrices, linear transformations, and orthogonal matrices.
• System of linear equations, existence and uniqueness, left and right inverses, pseudo inverse, triangular systems.
• LU decomposition and computational complexity, rotators and reflectors, QR decomposition, and Gram Schmidt Orthogonalization.
• Condition number of a square matrix, geometric interpretation, norm of matrix, and sensitivity analysis results for the system of linear equations.
• Eigenvalue eigenvector decomposition of square matrices, and spectral theorem for symmetric matrices.

Important Details of the IIT Kharagpur Free Online Course

Those who wish to take the course will have to enroll on the official website before 29 January 2024, and the course will be available from 22 January 2024 onwards and will take about 12 weeks to get completed. Candidates can also opt to take an e-certificate with logos of NPTEL and IIT Kharagpur by paying for an examination and clearing it. The examination will be conducted on 28 April 2024 and interested participants will have to register before 16 February for the exam.