Foundations of Azure AI

This unit introduces core concepts of artificial intelligence and the Azure services that support AI workloads, including cloud and client-server architectures. Students will learn responsible AI principles and foundational model and machine learning concepts to prepare for hands‑on development and deployment in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze fundamental AI concepts and categorize common AI workloads (e.g., content moderation, personalization, knowledge mining) and map them to appropriate Azure services
• Apply cloud computing and client‑server architecture principles to design a high‑level Azure solution that supports identified AI workloads
• Demonstrate understanding of responsible AI by identifying fairness, reliability, privacy, inclusiveness, and transparency concerns and selecting relevant Azure Responsible AI tools or mitigation strategies
• Evaluate basic AI model and machine learning workflows by describing data requirements, steps for training/validation/testing, differences between pretrained and custom models, and indicators of overfitting and underfitting