CS 540 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2013)

This page contains information specific to Prof. Shavlik's section of CS 540 (Spring 2013).
Click here for general information about CS 540.

Instructor: Jude Shavlik

Office:       6393 CS Building
Email:        shavlik@cs.wisc.edu
Office Hours: Weds 1:30-3pm and by appointment (send email)

Teaching Assistant: Nick Bridle

Office:       1351 CS Building
Email:        nbridle@cs.wisc.edu
Office Hours: 2:30-3:30pm Tues and 3-4pm Wednesday, and by appointment (send email)

Additional Information

Table of Contents

Course Overview and Requirements

This course provides an introduction to artificial intelligence. Topics covered include knowledge representation, heuristic search, game playing, deductive reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty, planning, learning, (natural) language understanding, and philosophical foundations.

The work in the course will consist of 5-6 homework assignments (about one every two weeks), a midterm exam, and a final exam. Your programs will be partially automatically graded, so they must be written to run on the instructional Unix machines. Two or three of the homework assignments will involve programming tasks that are to be done in Java. You may write your code on any computer you wish, but it is your responsibility to ensure it runs on the CS Dept's instructional Unix machines (located in Rooms 1350, 1351, 1358, and 1370, and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5).

Homeworks will count for 35% of the grade, the 'midterm' exam for 30%, and the final for 35%. Quality class participation will have an impact on borderline cases. The course will be graded on the conventional (A-F) system.

Homeworks

Reading Assignments

Assigned May 1, 2012:
Chapters 26 and 27 of Russell & Norvig. Skim Some Notes on MLNs.

Assigned April 22, 2013:
Section 18.7 and Section 18.9 of Russell & Norvig. You might want to skim the other sections of Chapter 18, especially 18.6.

Supplemental lecture notes at: Debugging Translations of English sentences into FOPC

Assigned April 1, 2013:
Chapters 7-9 of Russell & Norvig

Assigned April 1, 2013:
Section 18.8.1 of Russell & Norvig. (You might also want to read this Wikpedia page and you might also want to check out the broader perspective of 'case-based reasoning' - the material on these Wikpedia pages will not be on the final, unless it was also covered in lecture or in Section 18.8.1.)

Assigned February 25, 2013:
Chapter 13, Sections 14.1 - 14.3 and Subsection 14.4.1 of Russell & Norvig (only Sections 13.1, 13.2, and 13.3 will be on the midterm).

Assigned February 22, 2013:
Sections 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5,7, 5.8, & 5.9 of Russell & Norvig (skim rest of Chapter 5)

Assigned February 13, 2013:
Pedro Domingos' paper "A Few Useful Things to Know About Machine Learning" (you can access this paper for free if you are on a UW-Madison network; if you use DoIT's VPN I believe you can also access this from a non-UW network, such as a computer in your apartment).

Assigned February 8, 2013:
Chapter 3 & Section 4.1 of Russell & Norvig (Skim Section 3.6 and rest of Chapter 4)

Asigned February 4, 2013:
Read Wikipedia page on Random Forests (I will sometimes call these 'decision forests', ie a set of decision trees).

Assigned January 25, 2013:
Review Appendices A & B of Russell & Norvig

Assigned January 23, 2013:
Chapters 1 & 2, Sections 18.1-18.3 of Russell & Norvig

Exam Schedule

Previous Exams (PDF unless otherwise noted)

Some General AI Articles and Sites

This page was created by shavlik@cs.wisc.edu