CS470/570: Course Information
1/15 - Don't forget to purchase your book before the 1st day of class! It is available at the bookstore!
Welcome to CS470/CS570 Artificial Intelligence!! This course is a CS upper-division undergraduate elective, as well as (in the CS570 version) a graduate course. The two courses are usually offered in "co-convened" format, meaning that both courses share the same meeting times and lectures, with differing standards and added deliverables for the graduate section.
This course is designed to provide an introduction to the specialized area of Artificial Intelligence; for the graduate section, this is augmented by deeper exploration of current research directions and challenges across the field. Artificial Intelligence is an incredibly broad field and is, collectively, one of the most active and exciting research areas in Computer Science. From a practical perspective, strong advances in the last decade or so have brought AI technologies out of the computer science lab and into the mainstream consumer market. While AI technologies have been utilized in narrowly-designed niche areas for years (e.g. VLSI chip design, theorem-proving, elevator scheduling, etc.), there has been a recent resurgence in interest, enthusiam, and research effort in the area, brought on by new consumer products like Siri (and similar voice recognition systems), smart home, and smart cars and smart agent applications for sifting overwhelming internet content. Also crucial, of course, is development of more powerful hardware infrastructure, e.g., faster machines, cheap storage, and faster internet connections.
This course provides a broad introduction to the field by examining the key areas of work from across the field, including expert systems, game playing, machine learning, theorem-proving, and natural language processing --- and the algorithmic approaches that underlie these areas and tie them together. Each of these areas could, in itself, be the subject of an entire course; our aim is to convey just an overview of each area and its key ideas and techniques, including some hands-on experience implementing some basic algorithms.
In general, this course provides a launching point for your own further work in the exciting area of Artificial Intelligence. For undergraduates, it provides a basis (and hopefully a motivation!) for pursuing graduate studies or industrial work in intelligent systems or technologies. For graduate students, the course can provide a clearer understanding of how AI technologies could support your own thesis work in Informatics, Robotics, or Cyber Systems.