T HE S CHOOL OF A R T IFICI A L IN T ELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence

NANODEGREE SYLLABUS
 Overview

Artificial Intelligence

This program will teach you how to become

Program Information
a better Artificial Intelligence or Machine
Learning Engineer by teaching you classical
TIME
AI algorithms applied to common problem
3 months
types. You will complete projects and exercises
Study 12-15 hours/week
incorporating search, optimization, planning,
and probabilistic graphical models which have LEVEL
been used in Artificial Intelligence applications Advanced
for automation, logistics, operations research,
and more. These concepts form the foundation PREREQUISITES
Algebra, Calculus,
for many of the most exciting advances in AI
Statistics, & Python
in recent years. Each project you build will be
an opportunity to demonstrate what you’ve
HARDWARE/SOF T WARE
learned in your lessons, and become part of
REQUIRED
a career portfolio that will demonstrate your Computer running OS X or
mastery of these skills to potential employers. Windows

INTERESTED IN THIS
NANODEGREE?
Contact us at
enterpriseNDs@udacity.
com.

2 THE SCHOOL OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Our Classroom Experience

REAL-WORLD PROJECTS
Learners build new skills through industry-relevant
projects and receive personalized feedback from our
network of 900+ project reviewers. Our simple user
interface makes it easy to submit projects as often as
needed and receive unlimited feedback.

KNOWLEDGE
Answers to most questions can be found with
Knowledge, our proprietary wiki. Learners can search
questions asked by others and discover in real-time
how to solve challenges.

WORKSPACES
Learners can check the output and quality of their
code by testing it on interactive workspaces that are
integrated into the classroom.

QUIZZES
Understanding concepts learned during lessons is
made simple with auto-graded quizzes. Learners can
easily go back and brush up on concepts at anytime
during the course.

CUSTOM STUDY PLANS

Create a custom study plan to suit your personal
needs and use this plan to keep track of your progress
toward your goal.

PROGRESS TRACKER
Personalized milestone reminders help learners stay
on track and focused as they work to complete their
Nanodegree program.

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 Learn with the Best

Peter Norvig Sebastian Thrun

RESEARCH DIRECTOR INSTRUCTOR
Peter Norvig is a Director of Research As the founder and president of
at Google and is co-author of Artificial Udacity, Sebastian’s mission is to
Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the democratize education. He is also
leading textbook in the field. the founder of Google X, where
he led projects including the Self-
Driving Car, Google Glass, and more.

Thad Starner
PRO FESSOR OF COMPUTER
SCIENCE
Thad Starner is the director of the
Contextual Computing Group (CCG) at
Georgia Tech and is also the longest-
serving Technical Lead/Manager on
Google’s Glass project.

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 Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 1: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

In this course, you’ll learn about the foundations of AI. You’ll configure your programming environment to
work on AI problems with Python. At the end of the course you’ll build a Sudoku solver and solve constraint
satisfaction problems.

Project Build a Sudoku Solver

Humans use reason to solve problems by decomposing the problem statement and incorporating domain
knowledge to limit the possible solution space. In this project you’ll use a technique called constraint
propagation together with backtracking search to make an agent that only considers reasonable solution
candidates and efficiently solves any Sudoku puzzle. This approach appears in many classical AI problems, and
the solution techniques have been extended and applied to diverse problems in bioinformatics, logistics, and
operations research. In this project you will demonstrate some basic algorithms knowledge, and learn to use
constraint satisfaction to solve general problems.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

WELCOME TO
ARTIFICIAL • Learn about the resources available to help you succeed
INTELLIGENCE

• Consider the meaning of “artificial intelligence”

INTRODUCTION
• Be able to define core concepts from AI including “agents”, “environments”, and
TO ARTIFICIAL
“states”
INTELLIGENCE
• Learn the concept of “rational” behavior for AI agents

SOLVING SUDOKU • Express logical constraints as Python functions

WITH AI • Use constraint propagation & search to solve all Sudoku puzzles

SETTING UP YOUR
• Use Conda to configure and manage Python packages and dependencies
ENVIRONMENT

• Learn to represent problems in terms of logical constraints

CONSTRAINT • Use constraint propagation to limit the potential solution space
SATISFACTION • Incorporate backtracking search to find a solution when the set of constraints is
PROBLEMS incomplete
• Use Z3 Solver to solve constraint satisfaction problems

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Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 2: Classical Search

In this course you’ll learn classical graph search algorithms--including uninformed search techniques like
breadth-first and depth-first search and informed search with heuristics including A*. These algorithms are at
the heart of many classical AI techniques, and have been used for planning, optimization, problem solving, and
more. Complete the lesson by teaching PacMan to search with these techniques to solve increasingly complex
domains.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

INTRODUCTION • Learn about the significance of search in AI

• Learn uninformed search techniques including Depth-First Search, Breadth-

UNINFORMED SEARCH
First Search, and Uniform Cost Search

• Learn informed search techniques (using heuristics) including A* Search

INFORMED SEARCH
• Understand admissibility and consistency conditions for heuristics

CLASSROOM EXERCISE:
• Implement informed & uninformed search for Pacman
SEARCH

ADDITIONAL TOPICS:
• List of external resources for you to continue learning about search
SEARCH

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 Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 3: Automated Planning

In this course you’ll learn to represent general problem domains with symbolic logic and use search to find
optimal plans for achieving your agent’s goals. Planning & scheduling systems power modern automation &
logistics operations, and aerospace applications like the Hubble telescope & NASA Mars rovers.

Project Build a Forward-Planning Agent

Intelligent agents are expected to act in complex domains where their goals and objectives may not be
immediately achievable. They must reason about their goals and make rational choices of actions to achieve
them. In this project you will build a system using symbolic logic to represent general problem domains and
use classical search to find optimal plans for achieving your agent’s goals. Planning & scheduling systems
power modern automation & logistics operations, and aerospace applications like the Hubble telescope &
NASA Mars rovers.

In this project you will demonstrate an understanding of classical optimization & search algorithms, symbolic
logic, and domain-independent planning.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

• Learn Propositional Logic (propositions & statements)

SYMBOLIC LOGIC &
• Learn First-Order logic (quantifiers, variables, & objects)
REASONING
• Encode problems with symbolic constraints using First-Order Logic

INTRODUCTION TO
• Learn to define planning problems
AUTOMATED PLANNING

• Learn high-level features of automated planning techniques using

search & symbolic logic including forward planning, backwards
CLASSICAL PLANNING planning, & hierarchical planning
• Explore planning heuristics & planning graphs

ADDITIONAL TOPICS IN
• List of external resources for you to continue learning about planning
PLANNING

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Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 4: Optimization Problems

In this course you’ll learn about iterative improvement optimization problems and classical algorithms
emphasizing gradient-free methods for solving them. These techniques can often be used on intractable
problems to find solutions that are “good enough” for practical purposes, and have been used extensively
in fields like Operations Research & logistics. You’ll finish the lesson by completing a classroom exercise
comparing the different algorithms’ performance on a variety of problems.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

• Introduce iterative improvement problems that can be solved with

INTRODUCTION
optimization

HILL CLIMBING • Learn Random Hill Climbing for local search optimization problems

SIMULATED ANNEALING • Learn to use Simulated Annealing for global optimization problems

• Explore and implement Genetic Algorithms that keep a pool of

GENETIC ALGORITHMS
candidates to solve optimization problems

CLASSROOM EXERCISE:
• Compare optimization techniques on a variety of problems
OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS

• Learn about improvements & optimizations to optimization search

ADDITIONAL OPTIMIZATION
including Late Acceptance Hill Climbing, Basin Hopping, & Differential
TOPICS
Evolution

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 Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 5: Adversarial Search

In this course you’ll learn how to search in multi-agent environments (including decision making in competitive
environments) using the minimax theorem from game theory. Then build an agent that can play games better
than any humans.

Project Build an Adversarial Game Playing Agent

AI agents acting in the real world have to “hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.” In this project you
will write an agent that uses that idea to make rational choices to achieve super-human performance in
games competing against adversarial agents. The principles of adversarial search provide a foundation for
autonomous agents acting in the real world, and for understanding modern advances in AI like DeepMind’s
AlphaGo Zero.

In this project you will demonstrate advanced algorithms knowledge, including minimax with alpha-beta
pruning for adversarial search.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

• Understand “adversarial” problems & applications (e.g., multi-agent

environments)
SEARCH IN MULTI-AGENT
• Extend state space search techniques to domains your agents do not
DOMAINS
fully control
• Learn the minimax search technique

• Apply depth-limiting to overcome limitations in basic minimax search

OPTIMIZING MINIMAX
• Apply alpha-beta pruning to overcome limitations in basic minimax
SEARCH
search

EXTENDING MINIMAX • Extend adversarial search to non-deterministic domains and domains

SEARCH with more than two players

• Understand other adversarial search techniques such as Monte Carlo

ADDITIONAL ADVERSARIAL Tree Search
SEARCH TOPICS • List of external resources for you to continue learning about
adversarial search

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Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 6: Fundamentals of Probabilistic

Graphical Models
In this course you’ll learn to use Bayes Nets to represent complex probability distributions, and algorithms
for sampling from those distributions. Then learn the algorithms used to train, predict, and evaluate Hidden
Markov Models for pattern recognition. HMMs have been used for gesture recognition in computer vision,
gene sequence identification in bioinformatics, speech generation & part of speech tagging in natural language
processing, and more.

Project Part of Speech Tagging

Probabilistic models allow your agents to better handle the uncertainty of the real world by explicitly modeling
their belief state as a distribution over all possible states. In this project you’ll use a Hidden Markov Model
(HMM) to perform part of speech tagging, a common pre-processing step in Natural Language Processing.
HMMs have been used extensively in NLP, speech recognition, bioinformatics, and computer vision tasks.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

INTRODUCTION TO • Model probability distributions based on a given set of parameters in a

PROBABILISTIC MODELS real-world use case, using discrete distributions.

• Review key concepts in probability including discrete distributions, joint

PROBABILITY
probabilities, and conditional probabilities

BAYES NETS • Efficiently encode joint probabilities in Bayes networks

• Learn about inference in Bayes networks through exact enumeration

with optimizations
INFERENCE IN BAYES NETS
• Learn techniques for approximate inference in more complex Bayes
networks

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 Nanodegree Program Overview

Course 6: Fundamentals of Probabilistic

Graphical Models cont.

LESSON TITLE LEARNING OUTCOME

• Learn parameters to maximize the likelihood of model parameters to

training data
HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS • Determine the likelihood of observing test data given a fixed model
• Learn an algorithm to Identify the most likely sequence of states in a
model given some data

DYNAMIC TIME WARPING • Learn the dynamic time warping algorithm for time-series analysis

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All Our Nanodegree Programs Include:

Industry Validation & Reviews Real World Hands-on Projects

Learners’ progress and subject knowledge Through a series of rigorous, real-world
is tested and validated by industry experts projects, your employees learn and
and leaders from our advisory board. These apply new techniques, analyze results,
in-depth reviews ensure your teams have and produce actionable insights. Project
achieved competency. portfolios demonstrate learners’ growing
proficiency and subject mastery.

Pre-Assessments Dashboard & Progress Reports

Our in-depth workforce assessments Our interactive dashboard (enterprise
identify your team’s current level of management console) allows administrators
knowledge in key areas. Results are used to to manage employee onboarding, track
generate custom learning paths designed course progress, perform bulk enrollments
to equip your workforce with the most and more.
applicable skill sets.

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 Our Review Process

Real-life Reviewers for Real-life Projects Vaibhav

Real-world projects are at the core of our Nanodegree programs UDACITY LEARNER
because hands-on learning is the best way to master a new skill.
Receiving relevant feedback from an industry expert is a critical part
of that learning process, and infinitely more useful than that from “I never felt overwhelmed while pursuing the
Nanodegree program due to the valuable support
peers or automated grading systems. Udacity has a network of over
of the reviewers, and now I am more confident in
900 experienced project reviewers who provide personalized and
converting my ideas to reality.”
timely feedback to help all learners succeed.
now at

All Learners Benefit From: CODING VISIONS INFOTECH

Line-by-line feedback Industry tips and Advice on additional Unlimited submissions

for coding projects best practices resources to research and feedback loops

• Go through the lessons and work on the projects that follow

How it Works
• Get help from your technical mentor, if needed
Real-world projects are
• Submit your project work
integrated within the
• Receive personalized feedback from the reviewer
classroom experience,
making for a seamless • If the submission is not satisfactory, resubmit your project
review process flow. • Continue submitting and receiving feedback from the reviewer
until you successfully complete your project

About our Project Reviewers

Our expert project reviewers are evaluated against the highest standards and graded based on learners’ progress.
Here’s how they measure up to ensure your success.

900+ 1.8M 3 4.85

/5
Expert Project Projects Reviewed Hours Average Average Reviewer
Reviewers Our reviewers have Turnaround Rating
Are hand-picked extensive experience You can resubmit your Our learners love the
to provide detailed in guiding learners project on the same quality of the feedback
feedback on your through their course day for additional they receive from our
project submissions. projects. feedback. experienced reviewers.

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Udacity Enterprise Syllabus Artificial Intelligence Dec2021 ENT