Week 19 · Data and AI

What is AI? Rules, data, learning and bias

"AI" is everywhere: in phone cameras, M-Pesa fraud checks, YouTube recommendations, chatbots, translation apps. But what is actually going on inside? Today you find out that a lot of AI is a simple idea — learn a pattern from examples — done at a very large scale. You will build the smallest possible learning program, and see how it can go wrong.

Software, data and AI90 minutesIntermediateLevel 2 module

In this lesson you will

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Explain the difference between a rule written by a programmer and a rule learned from data
Describe training data, labels, a model, training and testing
Run a tiny learning program that learns a threshold from labelled examples
Explain how biased or unrepresentative data leads to unfair results
Use AI tools responsibly and protect personal data

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Enrolled students get the complete notes: essential theory, key terms, a step-by-step practical walkthrough, an independent challenge, check-your-understanding questions and the take-home task.

What is AI? Rules, data, learning and bias

In this lesson you will

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