Grader & Mentor in CS 540

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, UW-Madison

What is this course?

This course is an advanced, senior-level offering for undergraduate students and an introductory course for graduate students. It covers a wide range of topics including Statistics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Search algorithms, NLP, and RL.

Course website: CS540, Spring 2022, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

My Role as a Grader & Mentor in this Course

  1. Conducted office hours to assist students with queries related to the lectures and homeworks.
  2. Collaborated with other mentors to do grading.
  3. Engaged in active discussions and resolved queries on Piazza.
  1. Teaching
  2. Collaboration, Communication
  3. Understanding of basic concepts in AI-related topics, including Probability, ML, DL, Search, NLP and RL.

My Reflections

For two semesters, I served as a mentor for CS 540, an experience I found enriching as I assisted students in their projects and elucidated topics in a manner that’s easily understood. One particular project stood out, where students designed an AI opponent using the Minimax algorithm to compete in Gomoku (Five in a Row) against human challengers. This was further optimized with the Alpha-Beta pruning algorithm. This project vividly showcased the prowess of AI algorithms.

Overall, the course projects are engaging. When it comes to exams and projects, the general level of difficulty for this senior-level course is relatively low.

Why should you consider this course?

I highly recommend this course for those who want to have hands-on experience with AI algorithms, but at the same time consider taking a senior-level course with middle/low workload. I advise taking CS 532: Matrix Methods in Machine Learning beforehand to solidify your grasp on mathematical proofs. Following this, CS 539: Introduction to Artificial Neural Networks can deepen your understanding of advanced neural network concepts like transformers.

What about the projects/workload?

The projects are primarily in Python and are both engaging and intuitive. The instructions are straightforward, quite friendly even to those unfamiliar with Python. While individual projects are of moderate difficulty, having them weekly might be challenging for those not used to such frequency.