Fundamentals of AI, Data, and Algorithms (PHIL7001)
How contemporary AI systems actually work — data, learning algorithms, and the assumptions built into them — for students arriving from philosophy and the social sciences.
Instructor: Alice Wong (co-taught)
Term: MA in AI, Ethics, and Society
Location: The University of Hong Kong
A core technical course on the taught-postgraduate MA in AI, Ethics, and Society at HKU. I co-taught the course and led tutorial sections.
The aim is to give students without an engineering background a working, non-hand-wavy grasp of what machine learning systems do: how data becomes a model, what an algorithm is and is not, and which claims about AI capability are supported by the mechanics rather than by the marketing. That grounding is what makes the ethics seminars later in the programme possible.