Everyone:

Welcome to CSE 30124 Introduction to Artifical Intelligence, which (as the syllabus states) is a broad introduction to the field of artificial intelligence. We will begin the semester with a brief history of the field and review of relevant mathematical concepts that form the foundation of AI. As the semester continues we will dive into Machine and Deep Learning and then at the very end loop back around to where we started.

Course Overview¶

Artificial Intelligence is an extremely broad field and while no doubt all of you will be familiar with some aspects of it, likely the GPT family, these tools are only a small subset of what the field encompasses as a whole.

We will begin the course at the top of the circle and work our way down. However at the end of the semester and the bottom of the circles we will find that we start to wrap back around again to the top.

Task 1: Slack¶

For communication outside of our meeting time, we will be using Slack, specifically the #cse-30124-sp25 channel:

https://nd-cse.slack.com/messages/cse-30124-sp25

There is a class mailing list, but most day-to-day communication (including office hours and homework help) should take place on Slack.

Task 2: GitHub¶

All of your work, other than the notebook for the Course Primer, will be submitted to GitHub using git. Your third task is to setup your GitHub repository by doing the following:

1. Sign-in or create a GitHub account if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the class homeworks repository from the following template:

   https://classroom.github.com/a/Qv4jfPvn

   This will create a private cse-30124-homeworks-$TEAMNAME repository under your own account and linked to the nd-cse-30124-sp25 organization.

3. Once this is done, you can clone your git repository to your local machine (or the student machines):

   $ git clone git@github.com:nd-cse-30124-sp25/cse-30124-homeworks-$TEAMNAME
   

   Note, that GitHub has recently shutdown password authentication.

   To remotely access your repository from the command-line, you have two options:

   1. Setup a Personal Access Token: With this method, GitHub will generate an application specific password that you can use with HTTPS. As the PAT is a long string of characters, it is recommended that you use it in conjunction with a password manager or keyring.

   2. Setup SSH Keys: With this method, you generate a local public and private key pair on your computer and then upload the public key to GitHub. When accessing GitHub from the command-line, you will use the private key to authenticate to the server. This is the recommended way to setup your repository as it will allow for passwordless access.

   Setup SSH Keys¶

   Here is a quick tutorial on how to Setup SSH Keys on the student machines (if you have not already):

   1. Generate SSH keys if you don't have them yet:

      # Accept the defaults, don't make a password if you want to go passwordless
      $ ssh-keygen
      

   2. Copy the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to the SSH Keys section of your GitHub settings page:

      https://github.com/settings/keys

      # Copy and paste the contents of this file into GitHub
      $ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
      

   3. Edit/create ~/.ssh/config to use this key with GitHub:

      # Add the following to your config (replace $NETID with your netid)
      $ $EDITOR ~/.ssh/config
      Host github.com
              User git
              Hostname github.com
              PreferredAuthentications publickey
              IdentityFile /escnfs/home/$NETID/.ssh/id_rsa
      

   Once this is done, you should be able to do git operations without a password. You will need to accept the host key the first time by typing in "yes".

   Note: Please update the README.md file to include your name and NetID so it is straightforward to identify your account.

Task 3: Reading¶

The readings for Wednesday, January 22nd are

1. CSE 30124 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

2. Introduction to Notebooks

   • Jupyter Notebooks

   • VSCode Notebooks

   • Kaggle Notebooks

   • Google Colab

Please at least skim all four, but for the purposes of this course you just need to get one of the methods working to run your notebooks. Notebooks can be run locally through something like VSCode, and this is what I recommend and use. If you have other methods, please feel free to reach out to your me to discuss them.

Task 4: Notebooks¶

Once you have done the readings, run the following notebook using the method of your choosing:

For your convenience the notebook is displayed below as HTML but you will likely find it easier to download the raw notebook file given above.