That probably means that the Zoomies out there can also hear me.

Or the students abroad who use the streaming service.

Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence I lecture.

My name is Michael Kohlhaase.

I'm also, for some of you, the director of the AI Master's program.

So I'm very happy to see you here.

There's only a fraction of students here.

Last time I looked we had 600 people on Stodon who were registered for the course.

Which usually means only 300 actually mean it.

And of course some of the Master's students in the AI program,

as well as in the data sciences program, still have visa problems,

so they can only attend remotely.

So a cordial welcome to the people out there on the internet as well.

Okay, so.

Today we're basically going to go over the boring stuff.

The admin, an overview, how you can make most out of these courses, and so on.

So one of the first things that's always of interest is what are the prerequisites for this course.

They're usually given in terms of courses that you've heard before,

which I assume almost none of you have because most of you are actually not from FAU.

So I only have access to the FAU courses.

So think of these prerequisites in spirit.

Mostly the prerequisites also mean what am I assuming that you already know.

Whether that's true or false probably depends on each of you.

It's going to be very difficult, but I have to assume something.

This is what I assume, I just want to make it transparent.

I'm assuming that you essentially have the mandatory part of a bachelor's degree in computer science from FAU.

Which means things like the math courses,

which mostly is relevant in terms of that you've suffered through understanding mathematical languages

and suffered through the occasional proof as the measure of truth.

So mathematical language will be important in this course.

I'm assuming that you've heard a little bit about logic.

I'm going to teach it anyway, but it's kind of an acquired taste.

If you've looked at logic at some point, that certainly helps.

I'm also assuming that you've done some theoretical computer science.

And also I'm assuming that you can program and have programming experience.

That's probably the shakiest assumption here from what I know about my audience.

That's what I'm going to assume and that's what I'm going to build on.

If any of those is false for you, if you know nothing about theoretical computer science or logic or whatever,

that just means you have to pick it up as we go along.

We're going to use mathematical language, because that's the language of science and AI is a science.

We're going to use programming as a tool.

After all, artificial intelligence is about mechanising a cognitive skill.

How else would you do it except by programming?

There are other ways of creating intelligent entities.

As they say, by unskilled human labour.

There's a lot of fun involved, but that's not what we mean by artificial intelligence.

We're going to use, as I said, mathematical language.

That can be a hurdle for many of you, but it's also an opportunity to pick it up.

Really, if you don't have these prerequisites formally or informally, take it as a challenge.

You can do this course, but it's going to be work.