CS 540 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2013)

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

• Prerequisite: CS 367 or consent of instructor
• Meeting schedule: MWF 11-11:50am, Room 1325 CS & Stats (last class day is May 10)
• Textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
  by Russell and Norvig, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 2010, 3rd edition.
• Moodle class page for course; you need to turn in assignments via Moodle.

Table of Contents

• Course Overview and Requirements
• Homeworks
• Reading Assignments
• Java On-line Textbook | Java 1.7 Manual
• The `Agent World' Simulator (no longer used in CS 540, though sometimes used in CS 760)
• Exam Schedule
• Previous Exams
• Graduate AI Courses at Wisconsin

Course Overview and Requirements

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

• HW5 - Logic-Based Reasoning, ANNs, and SVMs
  Due 11:59pm 5/8/13 (not accepted after 11:59pm on 5/9/13 so that a solution can be posted sufficiently in advance of the final exam) | Solution

• HW4 - Logic-Based Representation and Reasoning
  Due 11:59pm 4/26/13 (not accepted after 10:50am 5/1/13) | Solution

• HW3 - Bayesian Reasoning and Case-Based Reasoning
  Due 11:59pm 4/10/13 (not accepted after 10:50am 4/15/13)
  Nannon is a simplified version of the board game Backgammon and was created by Jordan Pollack, who gave me permission to use its design for educational purposes.
  See the final problem on this HW.
  Here is a video demo of an algorithm learning to play Nannon and another showing machine learning (a Bayesian Network) beating a hand-coded solution.
  | Solution (for paper-and-pencil problems)
  | Here is a report about the results of the class-wide contest. It is the email sent to my player that only use FROm, TO and WIN as the random variables.
  | Here is a report of the FROM-TO-WIN player against all the full-joint-table players on the 3x6 board with various game durations.
  

• HW 2 - Searching for Solutions
  Due 11:59pm 3/6/13 (not accepted after 10:50am 3/8/13) | Solution

• HW 1 - Learning Decision Trees from Training Examples
  Due 11:59pm 2/18/13 (not accepted after 10:50am 2/25/13)
  Solution (for Problem 1)
  Testbeds used in grading Problem 2: trainSet 1, testSet 1, trainSet 2, testSet 2, trainSet 3, testSet 3, trainSet 4, testSet 4 trainSet 5, testSet 5. Solutions on these five testbeds.

• HW 0 - Hand-in Practice and Parsing ML Datasets
  Due 11:59pm 2/4/13 (not accepted after 10:50am 2/6/13)
  Solution

• Academic Misconduct

  All examinations, programming assignments, and written homeworks must be done individually. Cheating and plagiarism will be dealt with in accordance with University procedures (see the Academic Misconduct Guide for Students). Hence, for example, code for programming assignments must not be developed in groups, nor should code be shared. You are encouraged to discuss with your peers, the TA or the instructor ideas, approaches and techniques broadly, but not at a level of detail where specific implementation issues are described by anyone. If you have any questions on this, please ask the instructor before you act.

• Late policy on HWs
  • HWs are due at 11:59 pm. Turn in HWs via your Moodle account.
  • Each student will have FIVE "free" late days for use over the semester, for delays due to illness, especially hectic weeks, interview trips, etc. Once these are exhausted, there will be a penalty of 10 points per day (starting at 12:01am; weekends and official university holidays are free).
  • To make the TA's job tractable, no HWs will be accepted more than one week late. Note that some HWs will have less than a full week for late days (usually because we want to post the solution for one reason or another).

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

• Midterm: March 12, 7:15-9:15pm, Room 1240 CS
  ONE (8.5x11) page of notes and a calculator allowed.

• Final (cumulative, though with emphasis on material covered since midterm):
  May 16, 12:25pm-2:25pm, Room 228 Educational Sciences (which is on West Johnson between North Mills and North Brooks streets)
  TWO (8.5x11) pages of notes and a calculator allowed.

• Midterm 2013(Word, pdf) | Final 2013(Word, pdf)
• Midterm 2011(Word, pdf) | Final 2011(Word, pdf)
• Midterm 2008(Word, pdf) | Final 2008(Word, pdf)
• Midterm 2002(Word, pdf) | Final 2002(Word, pdf)
• Midterm 2000(Word, pdf) | Final 2000(Word, pdf)
• Midterm 1999(Word, pdf) | Final 1999(Word, pdf)
• Exam 1 (1998) | Exam 2 (1998) | Final (1998)
• Exam 1 (1995) | Exam 2 (1995) | Final (1995)
• Exam 1 (1994) | Exam 2 (1994) | Final (1994)
• Exam 1 (1992) | Exam 2 (1992) | Final (1992)

• The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• AI Magazine (old issues available on-line for free)
• AI in the News
• AI Resources
• Chuck Dyer's Links of Interest (also many interesting non-AI links; highly recommended!)