CPSC 502: Artificial Intelligence I

• Instructor: David Poole
• Lectures: Mondays & Wednesdays, 12:30-2:00, DMP 201
• First Class: September 11
• Office hours: Mondays 2:00-3:00, Wednesdays 11:30-12:30, room ICICS/CS 127
• We have a WebCT course for grades, discussion, and copies of the draft textbook.
• The schedule will be maintained throughout the course and includes all of the slides used in class.
• There is information on the course project (or pdf).

Overview

This course is designed to be a "breadth" introduction to artificial intelligence. It will make a broad coverage of modern AI. It is suitable for those with no background AI, or with one undergraduate course in AI. It is designed for computer science students, but is also suitable for cognitive science students or those with some familiarity with algorithms, complexity, logic, probability....

Topics Covered

• AI and agents: what is AI, history, dimensions of complexity
• Agent Architectures: modularity, hierarchical control
• Search: uninformed and heuristic search
• Constraint Satisfaction: consistency algorithms and stochastic methods
• Logical Reasoning: logical consequence, inference
• Knowledge Representation: objects and relations, ontologies
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: abduction, probability, independence, Bayesian networks
• Planning: classical and decision-theoretic planning (utility theory, influence diagrams and MDPs)
• Learning: classification, learning probabilistic models, reinforcement learning

Organization

• For the first 9 or 10 weeks we will cover an overview of the material in lectures and assignments
• There will be a midterm on the material covered in class
• The last few weeks will cover current research topics presented by students
• Students will write a review paper based on the lecture they gave, with peer review of the papers

Grading

The tentative grading scheme is as follows:

• 25% Assignments
• 35% Midterm exam
• 10% Presentation
• 30% Paper

Assignments

• Assignment 0 (pdf)
• Assignment 1 (html, pdf)
• Assignment 2 (html, pdf)
• Assignment 3 (html, pdf), here is plumbingbuggy.pl. Programs you may need: cilog, Protégé, SWOOP..
• Assignment 4 (html, pdf).
• Not assignment 5 (html, pdf).

Text

We will use selected chapters from the forthcoming second edition of Poole, Mackworth and Goebel, Computational Intelligence (OUP, 1998) we are writing (available from a secure web site) and sections from Russell and Norvig, Artificial Intelligence : A Modern Approach, 2nd edn (Prentice-Hall, 2003) as the basis for certain background material.