In the age of digital media, the increasing presence of artificial intelligence (AI, hereafter) is changing the landscape of media and communication industry.  The applications include data-driven digital marketing, toys and gaming, AI and multimedia production, automatic customer service, computational news production, machine learning, recommender systems, search engines, among others.  Meanwhile, the "dark sides" of these emerging technologies also come to the fore, such as fake news, algorithm-confounded audience polarization, privacy protection, surveillance society, the dampening news professionalism, and the enlarging digital divide.

As an introductory and interdisciplinary course, this course first introduces the basic concepts, theories, and state-of-the-art techniques of AI as an overview.  It then elaborates several domains of applications of AI in media and communication context, followed by a critical reflection on AI.  Students are expected to understand the basic principles of AI, and how AI is changing the media and communication process.  They will also be equipped with an interdisciplinary and crucial perspective, and making sense of new technologies' social, cultural, and political implications, in both global and local contexts.