Artificial Intelligence (AI): The BIG Intelligent Chatbot Project (Flex Class)

Imagine creating a chat bot that can learn, lookup information on the web and respond accurately. This class is all about chat bot - but not the super simple chat bot most classes covers. The goal with this class is to learn about:

- What is artificial intelligence
- Machine Learning
- AI Architecture (how to architect an AI system so we can keep expanding it)
- Agent technology (small little code blocks that serve a single purpose - usually we call these agents)
- API technology (web interface to get information)

We will learn all these while building a fun chat bot in the Snap! programming language. Snap! is a Scratch like programming platform but with far more powerful features.

NO EXPERIENCE IN SNAP OR SCRATCH REQUIRED!!!

CLASS STRUCTURE
Each week students will complete a portion of the chatbot. Students will create a video of their current chatbot progress and explain how it works. This video should be posted in the classroom to allow other students to give feedback. 

During the architecture weeks (Week 4 and 5), students will design a flow chart to showcase their architecture. This chart can be made in a drawing program or PowerPoint and posted in the classroom (as a PDF file).

CLASS OUTLINE
Week 1: Introduction to Snap! programming language and to the concept of artificial intelligence. We'll build the first part of the chat bot where the bot learns your name and greets you in various ways. We will also discuss what is Artificial Intelligence and the difference between "weak" and "strong" AI.

Week 2 & 3: These two weeks are all about machine learning and basic archecture. We will give the ability for the chat bot to learn how to answer questions it has never seen before.

Week 4 & 5: Before we can add agent technology we need a way to support agents. These two weeks we will focus on software architecture. We'll create simple agents to test out the architecture we create.

Week 6 & 7: Application Programming Interface (API) is a technology that allows the chat bot to "talk" to various web sites on the Internet. We will create agents that can check on the weather and recommend restaurants near you.

Week 8&9: Reinforcement learning is an advanced machine learning technique that allows your chat bot to learn from its own mistakes. We will add reinforcement learning to remove the need for manually entering "questions and answers" in your chat bot

Week 10: The creative week. This week students will create their own agent(s) they can show the class.