Artificial Intelligence Syllabus

Instructor: Dr. John F. Santore
Phone: 508-531-2226
Office: Hart 220
E-Mail:
jsantore@bridgew.edu

Instructor Web Page: http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jsantore/
Course Web Page: http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jsantore/Spring2008/AI/

Office Hours: I also will take appointments if you cannot make my other office hours, however, I generally have meetings and work prepared for a day or two ahead so plan on about 48 hours from the time I get your request to us being able to meet.

Course Description:
In this course we will examine a variety of Artificial intelligence subfields. AI is a huge discipline, covering roughly everything that is easier for people to do than for computers, which is still quite a lot. We'll look at some pattern matching, Search/game playing, computational linguistics and whatever else we can squeeze in.

Textbook:
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach  (Second Edition) by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig

Class Requirements and grading:

This class will have both significant project and exam components. Students will have to pass both the project and exam portions of the class in order to pass the entire class.

Project related work: 45%
Class(homework/quizzes/participantion):8%
Exams (one midterm and one final): 47%

Project Work:

Projects will need to be done in either lisp or python. c like languages are not well suited for AI and will not use used in this course. Lisp is the traditional language for AI projects at least in North America. However, lisp is getting to be a bit of an older language (at 50 years old) and has in the last few years slowly been superceeded by python as the most commonly use language with the Russell and Norvig text. I will give a brieft introduction to python in this class. Projects may be done in either python or lisp at your discretion.

The Midterm will be scheduled for Thursday March 4. The final will be scheduled by the college.

Non-Project work:

Non-project work (exams and misc assignments) are individual assignments and should not be done with any other classmates. (discussion without recording devices is always allowed for homeworks, exams are closed neighbor) The exam part of the grade will be split evenly between the midterm and final exam.

Students with special needs:

Anyone who has special needs should contact me in the first week of classes so that reasonable accommodations can be agreed on.


Academic Integrity:

See http://www.bridgew.edu/Handbook/PoliciesProcedures/academicmisconduct.cfm for a complete description of the academic integrity procedure at Bridgewater.


Academic integrity will be taken very seriously in this class. All individual work must be your own. If you cheat or otherwise represent the work of others as your own. You will receive an F for the course.

Guidelines for proper academic integrity:

Discussing problems with your classmates can help you understand the problems and kinds of solutions to those problems that you will learn about in this class. In an effort to make in clear what sort of discussions are appropriate and encouraged in this class and which cross the line to academic dishonesty I use the following guidelines: You may discuss any out of class problem I assign in this class with your classmates or other so long as no one is using any sort of recording implement including, but not limited to, computers, pdas, pens, pencils, phones etc. This lets you talk about theoretical solutions without sharing the actual implementations. As soon as anyone in the group is typing, writing etc, all conversations must stop. You may look at someone else's program code only very briefly in order to spot a simple syntax error. As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself looking at someone else's code for more than about 30-45 seconds it is probably time to stop. If you are having trouble with your program, come to the instructors office hours for more help.

All in class exams and quizzes are closed book and closed neighbor. If you are found using a data storage device of any kind during one of these evaluations, you will be failed for the course.

Of course for your group work, your entire group is intended to produce a single deliverable and are expected to work together on all parts of that so the above does not apply to members of a group working together on their group work.

Standards for in class behavior:

You are all adults and are expected to act as adults in this class. While questions are encouraged in this class, if a particular line of questioning is taking us too far afield, I will ask the student to come by my office hours or to see me after class.

Cell phones, pagers, electronic organizers and other devises should be silenced while in class. If you work of EMS or something similar, please turn your cell phones/ pagers etc to vibrate mode so that you are not disrupting others in the class.

In the unlikely case of trouble makers in the class, those who are simply attempting to disrupt the class will be asked to stop; those who will not, will be referred to the college for appropriate action.


Tentitive Schedule

Week Topic Project
Week 1 Intro to the topic/Eliza
Week 2 Python/agents Eliza project assigned
Week 3 Python/search
Week 4 heuristics, backtracking and adverserial search
Week 5 Natural Language processing Game playing project
Week 6 Statistical NLP
Week 7 NLP discourse and more
Week 8 Knowledge Rep and reasoning NLP project
Week 9 Knowledge Rep and reasoning
Week 10 Planning
Week 11 Planning Planning project
Week 12 Learning
Week 13 Learning: statistical
Week 14