Course Description
CSE 415: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence The University of Washington, Seattle, Winter 2008
Artificial intelligence is a broad field encompassing computational models of human cognition, formal systems for representing and processing symbolic information, expert systems technology, and a variety of techniques for learning, understanding signals, and solving problems.   This course begins with a discussion of what "artificial intelligence" means and how it can be useful. Then we explore the Python programming language and how it can be used to represent and process symbolic information. That's followed by an in-depth treatment of knowledge representation, with a focus on first-order predicate calculus. After that, we cover a variety of AI techniques, including state-space search and genetic search, case-based reasoning, reasoning under uncertainty, learning of decision trees from examples, natural language understanding, image understanding, and neural networks.   The teaching methodology combines lectures, in-class exercises, laboratory activities, and programming projects.