Artificial Intelligence

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Assess the validity of approaches to model intelligent processing
• Assess the claims of AI practitioners as they relate to 'intelligence'
• Assess the applicability of AI techniques to novel domains
• Select appropriately from a range of techniques for intelligent systems
• Assess the ethical issues of intelligent systems.

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• The main techniques that have been used in AI, and their range of applicability
• The principal achievements and shortcomings of AI
• Likely future developments in AI
• The difficulty of distinguishing AI from advanced computer science in general

Introduction to AI

• Flavours of AI: strong and weak, neat and scruffy, symbolic and sub-symbolic, knowledge-based and data-driven.
• The computational metaphor. What is computation? Church-Turing thesis. The Turing test. Searle's Chinese room argument.

Search

• Finding satisfactory paths and outcomes; chosen from: depth-first and breadth-first, iterative deepening, evolutionary algorithms, hill-climbing and gradient descent, beam search and best-first. Finding optimal paths: branch and bound, dynamic programming, A*.

Representing Knowledge

• Production rules, monotonic and non-monotonic logics, semantic nets, frames and scripts, description logics.

Reasoning and Control

• Data-driven and goal-driven reasoning, AND/OR graphs, truth-maintenance systems, abduction and uncertainty.

Reasoning under Uncertainty

• Probabilities, conditional independence, causality, Bayesian networks, noisy-OR, d-separation, belief propagation.

Machine Learning

• Inductive and deductive learning, unsupervised and supervised learning, reinforcement learning, concept learning from examples, Quinlan's ID3, classification and regression trees, Bayesian methods.

Key Application Areas, selected from:

• Expert system, decision support systems
• Speech and vision
• Natural language processing
• Information Retrieval
• Semantic Web

The content of this module is delivered through lectures, the module website, directed reading, pre-recorded materials and tutorials.

Students work on their understanding through a combination of independent study, preparation for timetabled activities and tutorials, along with formative assessments in the form of coursework assignments.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.