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 and other non-monotonic logics as a tool for representing cognitive (or common sense) knowledge in a symbolic form. It will also cover temporal aspects of reasoning through the presentation of simple languages for reasoning about actions and change. 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 natural language processing.