University of British Columbia
Department of Computer Science
CPSC 502: Artificial Intelligence I
Fall 2009
- Instructor: Alan Mackworth
- Teaching Assistant: Pooyan
Fazli
- Lectures: Tuesday & Thursday, 11:00-12:20, MCML
154
- First Class: September 10 (Thursday)
- Office hours: Tuesday 13:00 - 14:00 or by appointment, ICCS 121
- We have a WebCT Vista course for
grades, discussion, and the copy of the draft textbook.
Overview
This course is designed to be a "breadth" introduction to artificial
intelligence. It provides 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 or engineering 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
- Reasoning under uncertainty: probability, independence, Bayesian
networks
- Planning: classical, decision theoretic planning (utility theory,
influence diagrams and Markov decision processes)
- Learning: classification, reinforcement learning
- Knowledge Representation: objects and relations, ontologies
Organization
- For the first 11 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 two weeks will cover current research topics presented by
students
- Students will write a short review paper based on the lecture they gave,
and peer review the papers of other students
Grading
The tentative grading scheme is as follows:
- 25% Assignments
- 35% Midterm exam
- 10% Presentation
- 30% Paper
Assignments
These will appear here as the course
progresses. There will be three or four assignments.
Text
We will use selected chapters from the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence: Foundations
of Computational Agents by Poole and Mackworth (Cambridge University Press,
2009). The HTML is available online, and PDF of the chapters we use will be
made available from the Vista site.
Schedule
The lecture schedule and slides are here.
Last updated 2009-09-14, Alan
Mackworth