Master’s in Data Science Courses & Curriculum | Northwestern SPS - Northwestern School of Professional Studies

Course Schedule, Part-time Online Program

Please note that course schedules may be amended due to low enrollment, faculty availability, and/or other factors.

Online Sync Sessions are an integral part of the online learning experience. Additional information about learning concepts and assignments may be discussed and sync sessions offer valuable opportunities for students to interact with their faculty and peers during the term. We encourage all students to attend live, but if they are unable to, sync sessions will be recorded and posted within Canvas to allow for an asynchronous model of success as well.

MSDS 464-DL : Intelligent Systems and Robotics

Description

This course introduces reinforcement learning as an approach to intelligent systems, emphasizing applications such as robotic processes automation, conversational agents and robotics that mimic human behavior. Students implement intelligent agents to solve both discrete- and continuous-valued sequential decision-making problems. Students develop, debug, train, visualize, and customize programs in a variety of learning environments. The course reviews Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, temporal difference learning, Monte Carlo reinforcement learning, eligibility traces, the role of function approximation, and the integration of learning and planning. This is a case study and project-based course with a substantial programming component.

Recommended prior course: MSDS 458-DL Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning.

Prerequisites: (1) MSDS 420-DL Database Systems or CIS 417 Database Systems Design and Implementation and (2) MSDS 422-DL Practical Machine Learning or CIS 435 Practical Data Science Using Machine Learning.