Introduction

This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, EP/Z534936/1.

Welcome to Getting Started with AI, a hands-on introductory course designed to give you a solid grounding in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning — from the fundamental concepts all the way through to the large language models powering today’s most talked-about chatbot tools.

Artificial Intelligence is a broad field concerned with building systems that can perform tasks normally requiring human-level reasoning: recognising patterns, making predictions, understanding language, and more. This course focuses on the machine learning branch of AI — where systems learn directly from data rather than from hand-crafted rules — and traces a path from classical algorithms through to modern neural networks and large language models (LLMs).

No prior experience with AI or programming is assumed. By the end of the session you will have built genuine intuition for how these systems work, not just what they can do.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

  • Describe the AI landscape and explain the machine learning paradigm
  • Distinguish between supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning
  • Explain regression and classification and identify appropriate use cases for each
  • Interpret common evaluation metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall
  • Understand the architecture behind modern large language models, including the transformer and attention mechanisms, and their key limitations

About this Course

Each part combines short explanations with interactive visualisations and hands-on examples so you can immediately see the concepts in action. Parts 2 and 3 include guided coding exercises; no setup is required beyond a web browser. The materials are self-contained and designed to be revisited at your own pace after the session.

These course materials have been designed and developed by the Jean Golding Institute, University of Bristol: Pau Erola (lead), Rita Rasteiro, Josh Tyler, Ben Westhenry, Richard Lane, James Thomas.

We used AI assistance in line with institutional guidance:

  • Microsoft Copilot (GPT-5) – Writing assistance
  • Claude (Sonnet 4) – Writing assistance and example code generation
  • Google Gemini (Gemini 3) – Image generation

For queries related to this course please contact jgi-training@bristol.ac.uk.