Artificial Intelligence - 605.645

This is a foundational course in Artificial Intelligence. Although we hear a lot about machine learning, artificial intelligence is a much broader field with many different aspects. In this course, we focus on three of those aspects: reasoning, optimization, and pattern recognition. Traditionally, the first was covered under “Symbolic AI” or “Good Old Fashioned AI” and the latter two were covered under “Numeric AI” (or more specifically, “Connectionist AI” or “Machine Learning”). However, despite the many successes of machine learning algorithms, practitioners are increasingly realizing that complicated AI systems need algorithms from all three aspects. This approach falls under the ironic heading “Hybrid AI”. In this course, the foundational algorithms of AI are presented in an integrated fashion emphasizing Hybrid AI. The topics covered include state space search, local search, example based learning, model evaluation, adversarial search, constraint satisfaction problems, logic and reasoning, expert systems, rule based ML, Bayesian networks, planning, reinforcement learning, regression, logistic regression, and artificial neural networks (multi-layer perceptrons). The assignments weigh conceptual (assessments) and practical (implementations) understanding equally.

Course Prerequisite(s)

EN.605.621 Foundations of Algorithms. A working knowledge of Python programming is assumed as all assignments are completed in Python.