EVA: Complementary Modules AY22-23

Oral presentations (~30 min.), Writing of several blog posts, active participation

We meet roughly every 3^rd week throughout the semester for colloquia (discussions in a group setting), concluded by a final presentation of each participant. Each colloquium deals with a specific scholarly issue, e.g. topic assignment, understanding writing, understanding content, practicing critizism, and managing oneself. The discussions focus on how to do scholarly work, based on the examples of the individual publications that each participant chose, and personal experience. They are accompanied by writing assignments in every participant’s personal blog.

Five biweekly discussion sessions of two hours plus two sessions of final presentations and discussions (in-class teaching discussion and presentations; total 20 hours) plus independent self-learning and directed workgroup (total: 70 hours)

English

The goal of the AI Seminar is to learn the art of scholarship, specifically to read and write original scientific work. To this end, each participant picks an AI research paper according to his/her research interests that serves as an example throughout the course.

You have consciously considered the very basic tool of a researcher: literature study, writing and presenting.

• You are able to read, comprehend and assess original scientific publications
• You are able to communicate your findings in the academic ways of an oral talk and in writing

You will have made a deep dive into a sub field of your choice of artificial intelligence

Examples:

• Mnih et al, “Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning”, 2015
• J. Schmidhuber, “Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes”, 2009

Supplementary:

• J. Zobel, “Writing for Computer Science”, 2004

Ricardo Chavarriaga (char@zhaw.ch)
Thilo Stadelmann (stdm@zhaw.ch)