Introduction to Computational Expression

Catalog description

This course is designed to introduce freshman and sophomore undergraduate students to the technical and societal workings of programming languages in artificial intelligence (AI). Programming languages are expressions of the mathematics developers need to create, train, and deploy AI systems of all kinds. Students in this course will not be learning a variety of programming languages, though a few will be explored lightly.  This course explores the why of programming: the logic that makes it necessary (so far). The course introduces students to mathematical concepts integral to AI, such as probability, statistics, and gradient descent and invites them to think about why programming languages are needed for the development of AI.  At the end of the course, students will have a basic understanding of why programming works, will have independently used the programming software jupyter notebooks, and will be able to identify basic python libraries for training a handful of AI models on their own machine.