COS512: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS, Foundations)

The course covers fundamental notions from Artificial Intelligence, as a basis for subsequent courses. It introduces the notion of an autonomous agent, and presents basic architectures, elaborating on the role of perception, learning, and reasoning in these architectures. It discusses formal logics such as the Propositional and Predicate Calculi as a tool for representing cognitive (or common sense) knowledge in a symbolic form. It also discusses search in state spaces as a fundamental mechanism for problem solving and introduces blind search, heuristic search as well as search topics in constraints and in games. It then discusses learning as a process of induction from past experiences, and presents simple frameworks (such as learning in the limit) that formalize this and learning tools that can be developed according to this theory to help us acquire automatically common sense knowledge. The course will also introduce some preliminary aspects of Prolog programming, using Prolog as an induction approach to programming and other AI concepts.