The workshop will consist of two parts. In the first part we will do a brief introduction, explaining what we understand as intelligence and what artificial intelligence is. We will do a brief history of how AI emerged, we will explain what the domains of AI are and what Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Deep Learning are. We will focus then on the latter, go through some of the most important turning points in the history of Neural Networks, from Rosenblatt’s perceptron up to OpenAI’s ChatGPT that recently became a phenomenon on a global scale. We will summarize the talk by high-lighting selected emerging problems and future research directions.

In the second part we will do a hands-on tutorial, focusing on two hello-world deep-learning tasks. In the first task we will focus on the Computer Vision (CV) domain and build and train a simple neural network able to recognize handwritten digits. In the second part we will implement one of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) classical tasks and build a text classifier able to distinguish emails from spam.