Study of computational principles and techniques that enable software systems to improve their performance by learning from data. Focus on fundamental algorithms, mathematical models and programming techniques used in Machine Learning. Topics include: different learning settings (such as supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning), various learning algorithms (such as decision trees, neural networks, k-NN, boosting, SVM, k-means) and crosscutting issues of generalization, data representation, feature selection, model fitting and optimization. The course covers both theory and practice, including programming and written assignments that utilize concepts covered in lectures.