Instructor: Bart Massey <bart@cs.pdx.edu>
Time: Monday/Wednesday 12:00-13:50 (noon-1:50 PM)
Place: Clay Building Room 103
CRN: 44344 (441), 44345 (541)
URL: http://wiki.cs.pdx.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=5
As always, this is a tentative syllabus. Everything here is subject to vast change with little notice.
CS 441/541 is a first course in artificial intelligence. The fluent ability to write programs and a strong understanding of computing are necessary prerequisites: students must have previously completed PSU CS 202 (Programming Systems) and CS 311 (Discrete Math) or equivalent. Prior completion of CS 300 (Software Engineering) and CS 350 (Algorithms) is not prerequisite, but is highly recommended.
Prof. Melanie Mitchell taught this course in 2008, and Prof. Bryan York in 2009. I am using Prof. Mitchell's text.
The catalog says the course goals are for students to be able to:
- Describe several real-world applications of AI.
- Describe and implement AI search techniques for heuristic problem-solving and game playing, and describe their strengths and limitations.
- Describe and implement various AI knowledge-representation techniques.
- Design software agents that use Bayesian techniques to learn and reason under uncertainty.
- Design software agents that use reinforcement learning techniques.
- Design simple genetic algorithms.
- Describe some of the major approaches to current-day research on natural-language processing, computer vision, analogy-making, and robotics.
- Summarize major philosophical and ethical questions regarding AI.
This course will proceed via lectures, project-oriented homework, and a final project.
The course website (see above) will be the focus of communication. Students are encouraged to contact the instructor any time by email for an appointment if there are things that seem worth discussing. Special and/or regular office hours will be instituted if demand warrants.
The course lectures will cover a variety of topics, and may include guest lectures. Please attend them all; they are required and should be useful.
The course textbook
Artificial Intelligence: A Systems Approachis available at the bookstore. There may also be additional readings as the course progesses.
M. Tim Jones
Jones and Bartlett 2008
The coursework will consist of regular textbook readings, as well as several small programming projects through week 5, and a larger programming project through finals week.
Due to the size of the course and the volume of material to be covered, novel grading methods may be employed, including automatic grading, self-grading, and cross-grading with other students
The graduate students taking CS 541 will have additional requirements for their final project. All students, graduate and undergraduate, will be expected to be able to attend lecture during the entire class period.
Currently, the CS laboratory facilities consist of 17 Linux machines in the Linux lab. However, work may be done on any of the Departmental UNIX or Linux boxes remotely, using the Windows lab machines or from home. Those with home or laptop UNIX / Linux boxes are encouraged to use them—make sure they're adequately backed up, though.
If you do something that violates the University's or the Department's Student Conduct code, there will likely be consequences. In particular, it is not permitted to plagiarize (use other people's ideas, text, or code without acknowledgment). If you have questions, please contact me for clarification.