University of British Columbia
Department of Computer Science
CPSC 502: Artificial Intelligence I
Fall 2006
- 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
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.
Last updated 2006-08-17, David Poole