CMSC671  Principles of Artificial Intelligence

CMSC671 Principles of Artificial Intelligence

Spring 1994

Instructor and Teaching Assistant

Instructor  Teaching Assistant
Tim Finin  Linglan Zhang
ECS 210  ECS 213
410-455-3522  410-455-3965
finin@cs.umbc.edu linglan@cs.umbc.edu
Office Hours: tbd tbd

Text

We will be using the following:

• Essentials of Artificial Intelligence, Matt Ginsberg, Morgan-Kaufmann.

• Programming in Prolog, Clocksin and Mellish, Springer-Verlag.

• SICStus Prolog Users’ Manual, Swedish Institute of Computer Science. (175 pages) We will be supplementing this material with selected papers and articles over the course of the

semester.

The last book is available for purchase from the Computer Science Department at a cost of of $15.00. Please bring a check or the exact amount in cash. If you are unable to pick these up at this time or have a friend pick them up for you, please see me about alternate arrangements.

Tentative Schedule

# week of topic  comment
1 1/31 Introduction  EAI 1, 2
2 2/7 Prolog PIP
3 2/14 Prolog  PIP
4 2/21 Search  EAI 3,4
5 2/28 Search  EAI 4,5
6 3/7 KR: Logic EAI 6,7
7 3/14 Spring Break
8 3/21 KR: Logic  EAI 8, midterm
9 3/28 KR: TMS  EAI 10
10 4/4 KR: Non-mon Reasoning EAI 11
11 4/11 KR: Uncertainty  EAI 12
12 4/18 KR: OO Systems  EAI 13, KL-ONE paper
13 4/25 Expert Systems  EAI 18
14 5/2 Learning  EAI 15
15 5/9 NLP  EAP 17
16 5/6 Final  FINAL

Communication channels

I would like to use email, news, gopher and WWW as much as possible for communication. Please send me (finin@cs.umbc.edu) an email message as soon as possible so that I will know your email address. There is a local newsgroup course.cs671 that will be used to post announcements of interest to the entire class. I will assume that you read this newsgroup on a regular basis. There is also a set of files accessible from the Departmental gopher server as:

  gopher://gopher.cs.umbc.edu/1/CS Courses/Graduate courses/671

Grading

Course grades will be based on the following work. The final weighting may be changed slightly.

Homework  = 50%
Midterm Exam = 15%
Final exam  = 25%

As per University policy, incompletes will be granted only under extraordinary circumstances; students who are enrolled after April 16 (the last day to drop a class) should be prepared to receive a grade of A-F.

Homework

There will a number of short homework assignments – perhaps six. Each assignment will have a due date. Homework that is submitted by class time on the due date will receive an on-time bonus. Each homework carries a two-day grace period after the due date, during which it may be turned in with no penalty. No homework will be accepted after the grace period expires.

Most of the homeworks will be programming assignments. To receive more than token credit, a program must run.

Exams

There will be a midterm examination and a final examination. The material covered by the exams will be drawn from assigned readings in the text, from lectures, and from the homework. Material from the readings that is not covered in class is fair game, so you are advised to keep up with the readings.

Academic Honesty

Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. In particular, examinations are to be your own work. You may discuss the programming assignments with anyone. However, any help you receive must be documented. At the beginning of your program, you must include a comment indicating the sources you used while working on it (excluding course staff and text), and the type of help you received from them. If you received no help, say so. Failure to include this comment at the top of your program will result in your program being returned ungraded.

The implementation of the programming assignments must be your own work. If you are stumped on a particular error, you may consult with someone else; however, if you consult with someone other than the instructor, the TA, or the consulting desk, you must place a comment in your code near the point of the error, stating the source and scope of the help you received. Reasonable help will not affect your grade; failure to cite your sources is academically dishonest, and will be dealt with harshly.