Course Description

Lectures:

• Tue/Th 09:25 – 10:40 AM, DH 1055

Course Description

No subject unleashes the spirit of innovation like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Think of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Deep Mind and technologies like speech recognition, autonomous cars, household robots, text analytics and NLP, social bots, and Microsoft’s surprise modeling, each of which is a little over a decade old, and each of which embodies core algorithms in artificial intelligence.

comp440 is a foundational course in artificial intelligence, the discipline of designing intelligent computer systems. We will learn to design and analyze autonomous agents that do the right thing in the face of limited computational resources and limited information. The main questions we will study are

• how agents can effectively make decisions in fully observable, partially observable and adversarial environments, and
• how agents can adapt their actions by learning from experience.
  

The course draws on material from computer science, probability theory, decision theory and game theory. We will study interesting examples of intelligent agents including self-driving cars, face and handwriting recognizers, game playing programs, package delivery robots, schedulers, spam detectors, named entity recognizers, and speech recognition systems.

The course assumes good knowledge of algorithms, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, probability and statistics, as well as considerable proficiency in Python. comp440 can be taken as part of a general education in computer science, as grounding for future research in artificial intelligence, or to gain familiarity with recent artificial intelligence algorithms for application in other fields.