PWF: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Physicists

ICTP Global Science Portal and ICTP Physics Without Frontiers (PWF) present an introductory online course on artificial intelligence for physics undergraduate and postgraduate students. The course explains what AI is, how it works and how it can be useful in physics, introducing machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing and large language models, including attention mechanisms, as well as AI-assisted scientific programming and agentic coding workflows, with emphasis on scientific validation, critical thinking, limitations and responsible use. Day 1 (17 November, Johanna Senk): what AI is; AI, machine learning and deep learning; supervised and unsupervised learning; random forests, boosted decision trees and neural networks; applications across the physical sciences. Day 2 (18 November, Tom Stevenson): machine learning in particle physics; boosted decision trees and neural-network fundamentals; training, testing, overfitting and validation; particle classification; an introduction to graph neural networks. Day 3 (19 November, Muhammad Alhroob): NLP and LLMs; tokens, transformers and attention; how LLMs generate text and code; AI-assisted Python programming; agentic coding; risks and verification of AI-generated code and results. Sessions run 14:00-16:00 CET each day. No prior AI experience is needed; basic Python is recommended.