I know a lot of ERE folks have technical backgrounds and educational goals, so here's a cheap way to scratch that itch. Stanford is making its CS221 course (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) available for free to anyone with an Internet connection this Fall. This isn't quite like the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative where they release notes and lectures online. Instead, you will actually be submitting the homework and tests to Stanford for real grades at the same time Stanford students are taking the course in Palo Alto. The course will be taught by Peter Novig and Sebastian Thrun.
There's more info on the course here:
http://www.ai-class.com/
And something resembling a syllabus here:
http://robots.stanford.edu/cs221/schedule.html