The course EBC4255 – Machine Learning for Smart Services aims to provide students of the Business Intelligence and Smart Services MSc program with the necessary knowledge to design smart services or intelligent systems. The course provides students with both a managerial and an engineering perspective. 

Literature
Reading for this course consists of two parts. In order to teach students the managerial perspective, I rely on Geoff Hulten’s book “Building Intelligent Systems: A Guide to Machine Learning Engineering“. This book serves as a guideline throughout the course and we use it to establish a common terminology and understanding. 

In terms of engineering there is a readinglist of academic papers covering the essential topics for building intelligent systems. The readings are subject to change, but cover evaluation (offline, online and through user studies), multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning. 

Teaching takes place through lectures, tutorials and two debates. For each tutorial students work on an assignment in R, covering the topics in the papers that are part of the reading list. In addition, two debates are held. One at the beginning of the course to discuss the relationship between AI and machine learning and one at the end of the course to discuss the ethical issues related to intelligent systems.