CSCI 5835: Artificial Intelligence

Instructor:

Dr. John R. Sullins

Office hours: MW 9:30 – 11:00, MW 3:00 – 3:45, F 1:30 – 2:00, or by appointment

Office: 333 Meshel Hall

Phone: 742-1806

Email: john@cis.ysu.edu

Web site: http://cis.ysu.edu/~john/

    Check the web site regularly, as assignments and announcements will be posted here.

Objectives:

  1. Introduce the foundations of Artificial Intelligence (including search, logical induction, and different approaches to automated learning).
  2. Demonstrate how these concepts are applied to practical problems, such as game playing, expert systems, planning, language understanding, pattern recognition, and robotics.

Prerequisites:

The official prerequisites are CSIS 2617 and CSCI 3710. As far as content, the knowledge that you will need coming into this course is (1) the ability to write data-structure level programs in C/C++, and (2) a good understanding of propositional logic and graphs/trees.

 

Textbook:

Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving (fourth edition), George F. Luger, Addison Wesley.

Given the dynamic nature of this field, not all material introduced by this course may be covered in the textbook. Where appropriate, I may provide my own notes for some topics.

 

Grading:

 

Homework/Programming assignments

25% 

 

Exam 1

12.5%

Date TBA

Exam 2 

12.5%

Date TBA

Research project/paper 

25%

Due final week of class

Final Exam

25% 

Wednesday, May 5, 1:00 – 3:00

            Last day to withdraw with a "W": Saturday, October 23

Homework Assignments:

The homework assignments may involve a combination of written problems and some simple programming (probably in C++) related to the application of core AI concepts. These will possibly include:

·        Designing an evaluation heuristic for an AI game

·        Simple applications in areas such as planning/learning/natural language understanding

 

Research Project/Paper:

You will be required to do either a research paper or a programming project (your choice) for this course:

·        The research paper should be 20-25 pages long, and should survey the current state of some important or interesting area of Artificial Intelligence.

·        The programming project is to be an implementation (in the language of your choice) of a program (such as a game) based on some AI-related algorithm.

In either case, you will be asked to give a short presentation on your paper or project during the last week of class. More details will be available as the semester progresses.

 

Tentative Course Outline:

WEEK

TOPICS

TEXTBOOK

8/23

Introduction to AI, Propositional and Predicate logic

1, 2

8/30

State space representation of problems, Heuristic search

3, 4

9/6

Game playing as search (no class Monday)

4

9/13

Deductive systems, PROLOG

5, 14

9/20

Advanced knowledge representation techniques

6, 7

9/27

Planning

7

10/4

Reasoning and Uncertainty

8

10/11

Probabilistic/Fuzzy reasoning

8

10/18

Syntactic natural language understanding

13

10/25

Semantic and probabilistic natural language understanding

13

11/1

Knowledge-based  learning

9

11/8

Neural network learning

10

11/15

Genetic learning

11

11/22

Advanced Topics (no class Friday)

 

11/29

Project/Research paper presentations

 

12/6

Final Exam (Wednesday 1:00-3:00)