Principles of Artificial Intelligence

Fall 2026 — CMSC 671

Announcements
Who, What, When, and Where

Check out the syllabus for all this information, including policies on academic honesty, accomodations, and late assignments.

Meeting Times
Sondheim 206
Monday & Wednesday, 10:00AM -- 11:15 AM
Instructor
Frank Ferraro
ferraro [at] umbc [dot] edu
Monday 11:15-12:00
by appointment
TAs
TBD
TBD [at] umbc [dot] edu
TBD
Topics
The topics covered will include problem-solving approaches, problem spaces and search, knowledge representation and reasoning, logic and deduction, planning, expert systems, handling uncertainty, learning and natural language understanding. Other special or current topics (e.g., fairness and ethics in AI) may be covered as well.
Goals
After taking this course, you will
  • be introduced to some of the core problems and solutions of artificial intelligence (AI);
  • learn different ways that success and progress can be measured in AI;
  • be exposed to how these problems relate to those in computer science and subfields of computer science
  • have experience experimenting with AI approaches;
  • practice your (written) communication skills.
Schedule

The following schedule of topics is subject to change.

Readings will be from the freely available, online text Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents, 3rd Edition: http://artint.info

The schedule will be updated soon.
Date Topic Main Reading: Read All Assignment Out Assignment Due
Monday, 8/24
  1. Course Overview: Administrivia and What is AI?
  • Ch 1 (What is AI?)
Wednesday, 8/26
  1. Agents, and Agent Architectures
  • Ch 2 (Agent Architectures and Hierarchical Control)
Monday, 8/31
  1. Search
  • Ch 3 (Searching for Solutions)
Wednesday, 9/2 Assignment 1
Wednesday, 9/9
  1. Constraint Satisfaction
  • Ch 4 (Constraints)
Monday, 9/14
Wednesday, 9/16