The University of Cyprus's MSc Deep Learning is part of the Master programmes in Artificial Intelligence 4 Careers in Europe (MAI4CAREU). One of Master's programme's courses, MAI642 - Deep Learning is split up into several lectures and is taught by Associate Professor Theocharis Theocharides. The eleventh lecture on Deep Reinforcement Learning is the part of the course’s scope on ‘Emerging Deep Learning Research and Applications’.

Learning outcomes 

The lecture begins by providing an overview of the landscape, the different facets of reinforcement learning, and how it differs from other learning algorithms before diving into: 

• Agent and environment
• Optimal value function and optimal policy 
• Q-learning
• Deep Q-learning
• Multi-arm and Contextual Bandit Algorithms

The lecture illustrates the theory with a lot of practical examples, illustrations, case studies, and interactive diagrams to offer students a comprehensive understanding of the course material. The (D)RL examples provided include: Backgammon, Tetris, self-driving cars, as well as Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri. Professor Theocharides also provides a a reading list for further learning.

Course content and schedule

The MAI642 - Deep Learning course is spread out over 13 weeks of lectures, which are split into 13 lectures covering 4 broader topics: 

• Week 1-3: Basics 
• Week 4: Fundamentals of Deep (Convolutional) Learning
• Week 5-9: Deep Neural Networks – Deep into deep learning
• Week 10-13: Emerging Deep Learning research and applications

The course then wraps up with a comprehensive final exam.