• Required:
  
  Russell, Stuart, & Norvig, Peter (1995), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall); isbn 0-13-103805-2.

• Recommended:
  

  1. Luger, George F. (ed.) (1995), Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); isbn 0-262-62101-0.

  2. Shapiro, Stuart C. (1992), Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (New York: W. H. Freeman); ISBN 0-7167-8218-9.

IMPORTANT DATES & TENTATIVE SCHEDULE:

Note: For the record, I have adjusted some of the dates below to reflect what we actually did in class, rather than on what I had hoped to do :-)

DAYS	DATES	TOPICS	READINGS
	Jan 23 - Feb 4	Intro to course. What is AI? Agents; Cassie.	R&N: 1 (Intro), 2 (Agents); Luger: 2 (Turing), 3 (Minsky), 4 (Newell & Simon), 5 (Newell)
Wed	Jan 23	CCS Colloquium David Pierce, UB CSE "Machine Learning Strategies for Corpus-Based Natural-Language Processing" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
Fri, Mon, Tue	Jan 25, 28, 29	First meetings of recitations
	Feb 6 - Feb 20	Search	R&N: 3 (search), 4.1 (best-first), 4.2 (heuristic search) Luger 16 (GPS)
Mon	Feb 18	*** PROJECT 1 (mini-Eliza) DUE ***
Tue	Feb 19	UB CSEGSA Grad Conference
Wed	Feb 20	CCS Colloquium Suzanne Stevenson, U/Toronto CS "Learning Semantic Classes of Verbs from Syntactic Frequencies" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
	Feb 22 - Apr 10	Reasoning: logic & automated theorem proving	R&N: 6 (logical agents), 7 (FOL), 9 (inference), 10.1, 10.2 (unification); Luger: 10 (Hayes, "In defense of logic"), 14 (Logic Theorist)
Fri	Mar 8	*** PROJECT 2 (search) DUE ***
Wed	Mar 6	CCS Colloquium Ernest Lepore, Rutgers/Phil & CogSci "An Abuse of Context in Semantics" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
Wed	Mar 13	Review for Mid-Term
Wed	Mar 13	CCS Colloquium Ray Jackendoff, Brandeis/Ling & CogSci "Reintegrating Generative Linguistics" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
Thu	Mar 14	CCS Colloquium Ray Jackendoff, Brandeis/Ling & CogSci "Possible Stages in the Evolution of the Language Capacity" 3:00 - 5:00 p.m., 280 Park
Fri	Mar 15	*** MID-TERM EXAM ***
Mon	Mar 18	Review of Mid-Term
Fri	Mar 22	*** Last day to withdraw with a grade of `R' ***
Sat-Sun	Mar 23 - Mar 30	Spring Break (no classes)
	Apr 12 - Apr 26	Knowledge representation; SNePS	R&N: 8 (KB), 10.5 (production systems), 10.6 (semantic networks); SNePS readings; Luger: 6 (Minsky, frames), 7 (Collins & Quillian, semantic networks), 9 (Schank, conceptual dependency), 19 (McCarthy, advice taker)
Wed	Apr 17	CCS Colloquium Susan Lederman, Queens U/Psych & CIS "Designing Haptic and Multimodal Interfaces for Teleoperation and Virtual Environments Systems: A Cognitive Scientist's Perspective" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
Fri	Apr 19	*** PROJECT 3 (automated reasoning) DUE ***
Wed	Apr 24	CCS Colloquium Jeffry Pelletier, U/Alberta Phil & CS "A Philosophical Look at Compositionality" 2:00 - 4:00 p.m., 280 Park
	Apr 26	Natural-language understanding	R&N: 22 (communicating agents), 23 (NLP); SNePS readings; Luger 8 (Winograd)
	Apr 29 - May 1	Philosophical issues in AI	R&N: 26 (philosophical foundations), 27 (future of AI); Luger: 2 ( Turing), 29 (Minsky, on various disputes in AI), 30 (Simon); Searle's Chinese-Room Argument See the newsgroup for login info if needed
Fri	May 3	Last Class: Review *** PROJECT 4 (SNePS) DUE ***
Mon, Tue, Fri	Apr 29, 30; May 3	Last meetings of recitations
Thu	May 9	***FINAL EXAM*** 3:30-6:30 p.m., Fillmore 355

1. Reading	CSE 472	CSE 572
   R&N sections listed above; other assigned readings	required	required
   Luger sections listed above	strongly recommended	even more strongly recommended!!
   non-assigned sections of R&N	recommended; at least read the intro & summary sections	strongly recommended; at least read the intro & summary sections

2. Not all assigned readings will be covered in lecture (in lecture, we shall only cover interesting or hard material, plus occasionally material that is not in the texts), but you are responsible for all assigned material in the texts and lectures.

3. See "How to Read (a Computer Science Text)".

1. You will be expected to attend all lectures and recitations, and to complete all readings and assignments on time. There will be weekly homework assignments, 4 programming projects (preferably in Lisp), a mid-term exam, and a final exam (during exam week). Taking both the exams is a necessary condition for passing the course.

2. All homeworks will be announced in lecture. Therefore, be sure to get a classmate's phone number (for instance, 1 or 2 people sitting next to you in class, whoever they are!) so that you will not miss assignments in the unlikely event that you miss a class. There may be occasional extra assignments and quizzes in labs.

3. You should subscribe to, and regularly monitor, the newsgroups sunyab.cse.472 and sunyab.cse.572. You may post questions and comments there that are of general interest to the entire class. From time to time, information about homeworks, etc., will be posted to the newsgroups. These newsgroups will be archived in the CSE 472/572 Newsgroup Archive.

4. Just as you cannot expect to learn how to drive a car by reading about it or by watching other people do it, the same holds true for doing computer science. Do your work on time--this is one course you simply cannot cram for at the last minute, so don't even try! I cannot stress this strongly enough. Homeworks and--especially--projects may be fairly time-consuming, so please consider your other commitments, and plan your time accordingly.

5. Students should notify Prof. Rapaport within the first two weeks of class if they have a disability which would make it difficult to carry out course work as outlined (requiring note-takers, readers, extended test time).

1. HW assignments will be of the "paper-and-pencil" variety, to be done at home.

2. The purposes of homeworks are:

   • to give you practice in applying the concepts covered in the course
   • to give you a chance to assess the level of your understanding

3. There will be approximately 1 HW each week.

4. Due dates will be announced in lecture when the homework is assigned. HWs will be collected at the start of lecture on the due date. This is so that the homework can be discussed in the class period when it is due.

   If they are turned in after the start of lecture, your grade will be discounted by one full letter grade (e.g., A becomes B, A- becomes B-, etc.).

   If they are turned in after the start of the next lecture, your grade will be discounted by two full letter grades (e.g., A becomes C, A- becomes C-, etc.).

   If you turn in a HW after the start of the class after that, your grade will be discounted by three full letter grades (e.g., A becomes D, etc.).

   No HWs will be accepted after that.

5. Put your full name, date, and your recitation number (R1, R2, R3) at the top right-hand side of each page, and secure all pages with a staple in the top left-hand corner.

6. Note: The lowest homework grade will be dropped. You should assume that you will fail to turn in one homework (oversleep, get stuck in traffic, etc.)--that's the one that will be dropped. If you know now that you will regularly be late, see me to make alternative arrangements for turning in your work. Your graded HW will be returned in recitation. Occasional extra assignments or quizzes from lab can be used to replace low HW grades, at your TA's discretion.

1. Programming Languages, Lisp, and Unix: The prerequisite for this course is knowledge of programming in Common Lisp. However, CSE 202 was not taught last semester, so it is quite possible that many of you do not know any Lisp. Therefore, I will allow all students to use their favorite programming language(s) for the projects.

   CSE 472 students will have accounts on the CSE undergraduate machines; CSE 572 students will have accounts on the Grad Lab machines. If you do not have access to these machines, please let me know as soon as possible! You will be expected to learn how to use Unix and emacs on your own.

   But you are strongly advised to (learn and) use Lisp if you intend to do any research in AI. Moreover, there are good reasons to learn Lisp even if you want to make it in the real world of e-commerce; see:

   1. Paul Graham's Lisp Resources

   2. St. Amant, Robert, & Young, R. Michael (2001), "Common Lisp Resources on the Web", intelligence 12(3): 21-23.

   3. ... and, especially,
      Graham, Paul (2001), "Beating the Averages".

   The implementation of Lisp for this course is Allegro Common Lisp (acl), which runs under the Unix operating system. You will be expected to learn the idiosyncrasies of Allegro Common Lisp on your own (the Shapiro text should be of help). For more information on Lisp, see Marty Hall's "An Introduction and Tutorial for Common Lisp" website. CIT offers short courses on Unix, etc. To contact CIT:

   in person:	216 Computing Center
   by phone:	645-3542
   by fax:	645-3617
   by email:	cit-helpdesk@buffalo.edu
   on the Web:	http://wings.buffalo.edu/computing/Help-Desk/ http://www.cit.buffalo.edu/students.html

2. Project Policies:

   • For each project, you will be expected to hand in a conference-style paper, typed or printed from a computer file, on 8.5 by 11 inch paper (stapled in the upper left-hand corner, without sprocket holes, and with your own title page), plus a well-documented listing of your program. (Please do not use folders or covers, unless your report is too thick to be stapled.) I strongly suggest that you learn to use Latex and ispell.

     In the real world, you will be expected to write papers, either for presentation at conferences, publication in journals, or presentation to your boss or co-workers. No one reads computer programs except the programmer him- or herself, or someone else who has to modify the program. Users and other people want to read about the program, what it does, how it works, etc., and to see it in action. Consequently, the main product of your work is the paper, not the program! In the paper, you should say what you have done, and say (in English summary, not in programming detail) how you have done it. It should also include annotated examples of your program in action. These should be well chosen to illustrate the range of performance of your program. The examples should not be redundant, nor included merely because they look complicated. Each example should illustrate a particular ability of your program. Nevertheless, the reader will assume that your program does nothing interesting that isn't illustrated! You should read Shapiro, Stuart C. (1999), "NimLearn: A Learning Nim Player", to see an example of a such a paper. By reading that paper, you might also learn some good Common Lisp programming techniques. (You can run the nimlearn program by running ACL, and loading /projects/shapiro/AIclass/nimlearn.)

     The program listing should either be presented as figures throughout the paper, or as an appendix. In either case, the listing is included as documentation for what you say in the paper.

     Thus, each report must consist of the following components:

     • descriptive title (not: "Project 1")

     • your name, the course number (either CSE 472 or CSE 572), your recitation section (R1, R2, or R3), & date due

     • abstract of project (a 1-paragraph summary)

     • description of the project (the body of the paper)

     • list of references (if appropriate)

     • annotated sample runs (could be part of the description of the project)

     • commented code (could be as an appendix)
     
     

   • Late policy for projects:

     • Projects must be handed in at the start of lecture on the due date.

     • Projects handed in between the start of lecture on the due date and the start of the next class are 1 day late.

     • Projects handed in between the start of class on the nth day after the due date and the start of the next class are n+1 days late.

     • Each project that is n days late loses n full letter grades. (E.g., an `A' paper that is 1 day late gets a `B'.)

     • Rule of thumb: In general, you are better off handing in an incomplete project - with a report that indicates what programming problems you had and what you left unfinished - than handing in a late project that is complete.

   HOW TO STUDY:

   For general advice on how to study for any course, see my web page, "How to Study".

   GRADING:

   All graded work will receive a letter grade: 'A', 'A-', 'B+', 'B', 'B-', 'C+', 'C', 'C-' (472 only), 'D+' (472 only), 'D', or 'F'. Your course grade will be calculated as a weighted average of all letter grades according to the following weights:

   Recitation grade (including attendance, homeworks, quizzes, etc.)	25%
   Projects	25%
   Midterm Exam	25%
   Final Exam	25%
   Total	100%

   For further information, see my web document on "Grading Principles"

   Incompletes:

   It is University policy that a grade of Incomplete is to be given only when a small amount of work or a single exam is missed due to circumstances beyond the student's control, and that student is otherwise doing passing work. I will follow this policy strictly! Thus, you should assume that I will not give incompletes :-) Any incompletes that I might give, in a lapse of judgment :-), will have to be made up by the end of the Fall 2002 semester. For more information on Incomplete policies, see the web page, "Incompletes".

   ACADEMIC INTEGRITY:

   While it is acceptable to discuss general approaches with your fellow students, the work you turn in must be your own. It is the policy of this department that any violation of academic integrity will result in an F for the course, that all departmental financial support including teaching assistanceship, research assistanceship, or scholarships be terminated, that notification of this action be placed in the student's confidential departmental record, and that the student be permanently ineligible for future departmental financial support. If you have any problems doing the homeworks or projects, consult the TA or Prof. Rapaport. Please be sure to read the webpage, "Academic Integrity: Policies and Procedures", which spells out all the details of this, and related, policies.

   CLASSROOM DISRUPTIONS:

   In large classes (such as this), students have been known to be disruptive, either to the instructor or to fellow students. The university's policies on this topic, both how the instructor should respond and how students should behave, may be found in the document "Obstruction or Disruption in the Classroom - Policies"
   
   

   ---

   William J. Rapaport (rapaport@cse.buffalo.edu)
   file: 572/S02/syl.26ap02.html