90147 - Artificial intelligence (1)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course students gain a basic knowledge of the history, techniques and methods of Artificial Intelligence; they are able to design solutions for simple use cases (typically in the area of the humanities) by defining conceptual models and/or reusing existing data and software components.

Course contents

The students will understand the evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the main distinctions and research styles, and the current state of play.

Students will be provided with an overview of the evolution and history of AI. Students will obtain basic references and capabilities on some knowledge-oriented aspects of AI:

• Intelligent agent design
• Knowledge representation
• Propositional logic, first-order logic, description logics
• Natural language processing
• Machine learning

Readings/Bibliography

Handbook (to be used as generic references):

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3rd ed. by Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley) and Peter Norvig (Google) - slides from the 2014 course: http://ai.berkeley.edu/course_schedule.html

Other recommended books

• "Speech and language processing” Jurafsky, Daniel, and James H. Martin https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/

• "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence" M. Flasinski Springer (2016)

• Logic in Action. http://www.logicinaction.org/

• Machine Learning: An artificial intelligence approach. "R.S. Michalski, J.G. Carbonell, T.M. Mitchell" Springer (2013)

Teaching methods

The teaching method is based on slots of 2 hours each, including highly interactive frontal lectures.

Assessment methods

The final exam will consist of an interview, with the intent to verify the general understanding of the fundamental themes, and of a survey about a topic chosen by the students out of a proposed list.

Teaching tools

Besides the teaching facilities installed in the lab, software tools for AI will be used on the existing machines by the students, either alone, in pairs, or in groups. The tools will enable the students to realistically test the problems faced by AI research.

Social media will be also used for informal interaction among students, and with the teacher.

Office hours

See the website of Luigi Asprino