Prep Courses

The World Wide Web- WWW – is the killer application of the Internet and a cornerstone of the digital world. To understand the digital transformation in society, business and private live one needs to understand how the Web is working. To this end this prep course provides all the Web basics.

First it explains how Web documents are

• designed with the hypertext markup language HTML,
• named and identified with URLs, and
• transmitted over the Internet with the hypertext transfer protocol HTTP.

Then the basic communication model is introduced, the client-server paradigm. Considering web applications, the functionality of client-side applications as well as server-side applications is discussed. As a very popular web service video streaming is explained in more detail before the course ends with an introduction to the principles of cloud computing.

Artificial Intelligence began in the 1950s, when the first computers became available. At that time, combinatorial problems (such as playing chess) were considered to be interesting because they required some mental effort, that programmers did not know how to describe, encode or simulate. The main tools of symbolic AI are combinatorics and logic processing. Due to the rapid increase in computing power (Moore's Law), some of those problems have become solvable, and computers now regularly defeat humans (for example, in chess or in the game of Go). In this course, we will look back to the early days of AI to understand the kinds of problems that were being solved.

The course provides students with the necessary background to decide whether to study AI and pursue a career in the field.

The Internet is the backbone of the digital world. To understand the digital transformation in society, business and private live one needs to understand how Internet is working. To this end the prep course provides the Internet basics.

The course explains the functioning of different types of computer networks and how such computer networks can be interconnected to form a virtually homogeneous net, the Internet. To this end intermediate systems like router and gateways are needed, and software, so-called communication protocols. The protocol stack that is used to form the Internet is the TCP/IP stack, consisting of protocols like IP, TCP, and a big number of application protocols like HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and many others which connect Internet applications and services like the WWW with the Internet.