Syllabus for CSC 8520-001 Artificial Intelligence
Wednesdays from 6:15pm to 8:45pm in Mendel G29
Dr. David Matuszek, Mendel 162C, (610) 519-5654
Villanova University, Spring 2000

URLs

Purpose

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a large and varied field. This course will provide a survey of some of the main themes in AI, and will introduce some of the fundamental algorithms and techniques used. Lisp and Prolog, the main programming languages used in AI, will be discussed but not used to any great extent.

Textbook

The textbook for the course is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, ISBN 0-13-103805-2. We will not be using Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, by Peter Norvig. (The change is due to a change in instructors for the course.)

Assignments and presentations

Each student will be asked to give two short presentations and to do a programming project.

The first presentation will be in mid-semester, and will be an overview of the "state of the art" (that is, what is currently happening) in some subfield of AI. Possible subfields include, but are not necessarily limited to:

Search, knowledge representation, natural language, spoken language, AI programming languages, automatic programming, cognition, theorem proving, vision, learning, planning, applications in field [X].

Each student will be asked to write a computer program, in a language of his/her choice, appropriate to some subfield of AI. The program will probably, but not necessarily, be in the same subfield as the student's initial presentation.

The second presentation will describe the student's program.

Grading will be on the basis of class participation, presentations, and the programming project.

Ethics

Students are expected to conduct themselves in an ethical, professional manner. You are expected to abide by the Villanova Policy on Academic Integrity, as well as the Computer Science Integrity Policy handed out in class. All projects and homework assignments should be done on an individual basis unless explicitly stated otherwise by the professor. All questions about projects or homework should be directed to the professor or the graduate teaching assistant.