IIT Madras Invites Applications for New 8-week Free Online Course on Artificial Intelligence

IIT Madras has invited applications for a new online course called Artificial Intelligence: Constraint Satisfaction that can be completed in 8 weeks

IIT Madras has announced a new 8-week free online course called Artificial Intelligence: Constraint Satisfaction, which is available on the SWAYAM NPTEL platform at present. The course will look at the general approaches to solving finite domain constraint satisfaction problems and explore how search can be combined with constraint propagation to find solutions. The course is free to enrol and learn from; however, to obtain an e-certificate with logos of IIT Madras and NPTEL, participants will have to pay Rs 1000 and pass an examination.

The course will be conducted by Deepak Khemani who is a professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Madras. He completed his BTech in 1980 in mechanical engineering, and MTech in 1983 and PhD in 1989 in computer science from IIT Bombay, and has been with IIT Madras since then, says the NPTEL website. His research interests include Memory Based Reasoning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Planning and Constraint Satisfaction, Qualitative Reasoning and Natural Language Processing.

What the IIT Madras Free Online Course Will Cover?

An approach to problem solving using artificial intelligence is to pose problems as constraint satisfaction problems, and employ general methods to solve them. With this backdrop the course will cover the following topics:

• Constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), examples.
• Constraint networks, equivalent and projection networks.
• Constraint propagation, arc consistency, path consistency,   i-consistency.
• Directional consistency and graph ordering, backtrack free search, adaptive consistency.
• Search methods for solving CSPs, lookahead methods, dynamic variable and value ordering.
• Lookback methods, Gaschnig's back jumping, graph based back jumping, conflict directed back jumping. Combing lookahead with look back, learning.
• Model based systems, model based diagnosis, truth maintenance systems, planning as CSP.  Wrapping up.

Who Can Take the IIT Madras Free Online Course?

The course can be taken up by undergraduate and postgraduate students pursuing computer science or any degree. The course is also open to professionals and other interested participants with a pre-requisite knowledge in basics of computer science. It is preferable for participants to have taken two other free online courses offered by IIT Madras namely AI:  Search Methods for Problem Solving and AI: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.

Important Details About IIT Madras Free Online Course

The course will be conducted from 24 January to 8 March 2022, and carries two credit points. Participants will receive a certificate only if they obtain an average assignment score of 10 out of 25, and an average exam score of 30 out of 75. Those who wish to enrol for the IIT Madras free online course on artificial intelligence are advised to go through the official website for more information.