CIS 830: Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence

Spring 2000

 

Hours: 3 hours (extended course project option for 4 credit hours: 3 of CIS 830, 1 of CIS 798)

Prerequisite: First course in artificial intelligence (CIS 730 or equivalent coursework in theory and design of intelligent systems) or instructor permission

Textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, S. J. Russell and P. Norvig.  Prentice-Hall, 1995.  ISBN: 013108052

Venue: Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10:30-11:20 Room 236 Nichols Hall

Instructor: William H. Hsu, Department of Computing and Information Sciences

Office: 213 Nichols Hall             URL: http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~bhsu                E-mail: bhsu@cis.ksu.edu

Office phone: (785) 532-6350   Home phone: (785) 539-7180                         

Office hours: before class (10-10:30am); 2-2:30pm, Wednesday; 1:30-2:30pm, Friday; by appointment

Class web page: http://ringil.cis.ksu.edu/Courses/Spring-2000/CIS830/

 

Course Description

This course provides intermediate background in intelligent systems for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.  Five topics will be discussed: analytical and multistrategy learning (hybrid analytical, knowledge-driven, and inductive learning), pattern recognition using artificial neural networks, reasoning under uncertainty for decision support, data mining (DM) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), and genetic algorithms and evolutionary systems for KDD.  Applications to practical design and development of intelligent systems will be emphasized, leading to class projects on current research topics.

 

Course Requirements

Homework: 4 programming and written assignments (30%)

Papers: 15 (out of 20) written (1-page) reviews of research papers (15%); class presentations (15%)

Examinations: 1 take-home midterm (15%)

Computer language(s): C/C++, Java, or student choice (upon instructor approval)

Project: term programming project for all students (25%); additional term paper or project extension (4 credit hour) option for graduate students and advanced undergraduates

 

Selected reading (on reserve in K-State CIS Library):

·          Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, C. M. Bishop. Oxford University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0198538499

·          Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning, D. E. Goldberg. Addison-Wesley, 1989. ISBN: 0201157675

 

Additional bibliography (excerpted in course notes and handouts):

·          Machine Learning, T. M. Mitchell. McGraw-Hill, 1997. ISBN: 0070428077

·          Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, U. Fayyad, G. Piatetsky-Shapiro, P. Smyth, and R. Uthurusamy, eds. MIT Press, 1996. ISBN: 0262560976

·          Readings in Machine Learning, J. W. Shavlik and T. G. Dietterich, eds. Morgan-Kaufmann, 1990. ISBN: 1558601430

·          Readings in Computer Inference and Knowledge Acquisition, B. G. Buchanan and D. C. Wilkins, eds. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. ISBN: 1558601635

·          Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems, J. Pearl.  Morgan-Kaufmann, 1988. ISBN: 0934613737

·          Genetic Programming, J. Koza. MIT Press, 1992. ISBN: 0262111705

·          Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, R. O. Duda and P. E. Hart. John Wiley and Sons, 1973. ISBN: 0471223611


Syllabus

 

Lecture

Date

Topic

(Primary) Source

0

January 14

Administrivia; overview of topics

RN Chapters 1, 14, 18

1

January 19

Analytical learning: overview

RN 21

2

January 21

Analytical learning: presentation

Thrun/Mitchell

3

January 24

Analytical learning: discussion

Thrun/Mitchell; RN 21.2

4

January 26

Analytical learning: presentation

Brodie/Dejong; TMM 11

5

January 28

Analytical learning: discussion

Brodie/Dejong

6

January 31

Analytical learning: presentation

Chown/TGD; TMM 12

7

February 2

Analytical learning: discussion

Chown/Dietterich

8

February 4

Analytical learning: presentation

Towell et al (TSN)

9

February 7

Analytical learning: conclusions

TSN; RN 21; TMM 12

10

February 9

Artificial neural networks: overview

RN 19; TMM 4

11

February 11

ANNs: presentation

Maclin/Shavlik

12

February 14

ANNs: discussion

Maclin/Shavlik

13

February 16

ANNs: presentation

Sutton; RN 16

14

February 18

ANNs: discussion

Sutton

15

February 21

ANNs: presentation

Hinton et al

16

February 23

ANNs: discussion

Hinton et al

17

February 25

ANNs: presentation

Jordan/Jacobs

18

February 28

ANNs: conclusions

Jordan/Jacobs; RN 16

19

March 1

Uncertainty: overview

RN 15; TMM 6

20

March 3

Uncertainty: presentation

Cheeseman

21

March 6

Uncertainty: discussion; midterm review

Cheeseman

22

March 8

Uncertainty: presentation; midterm

Friedman et al

23

March 10

Uncertainty: discussion

Friedman et al

24

March 13

Uncertainty: presentation

Horvitz et al; RN 17

25

March 15

Uncertainty: discussion; midterm due

Horvitz et al

26

March 17

Uncertainty: presentation

Darwiche/Pearl

27

March 27

Uncertainty: conclusions, DM: overview

Darwiche/Pearl

28

March 29

DM/KDD/decision support: presentation

Fayyad/Haussler/Stolorz

29

March 31

DM/KDD/decision support: discussion

Fayyad/Haussler/Stolorz

30

April 3

DM/KDD/decision support: presentation

John/Kohavi/Pfleger

31

April 5

DM/KDD/decision support: discussion

John/Kohavi/Pfleger

32

April 7

DM/KDD/decision support: presentation

Koller/Sahami

33

April 10

DM/KDD/decision support: discussion

Koller/Sahami

34

April 12

DM/KDD/decision support: presentation

Craven et al

35

April 14

DM/KDD/decision support: conclusions

Craven et al

36

April 17

Genetic algorithms: overview

TMM 9

37

April 19

GAs: presentation

Wilson

38

April 21

GAs: discussion

Wilson

39

April 24

GAs: presentation

Aler/Borrajo/Isasi; Koza

40

April 26

GAs: discussion

Aler/Borrajo/Isasi

41

April 28

GAs: presentation

Raymer et al

42

May 1

GAs: discussion

Raymer et al

43

May 3

GAs: presentation

Horn et al

44

May 5

Conclusions; all projects due

Horn et al; TMM 9

45

May 8

NO FINAL EXAM

RN Sections V-VII

 

RN: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, S. J. Russell and P. Norvig

TMM: Machine Learning, T. M. Mitchell

Lightly-shaded entries denote the due date of a paper review.

Heavily-shaded entries denote the due date of a paper review and a written or programming assignment.

 

Class Resources

Web pages

·          Official class page: http://ringil.cis.ksu.edu/Courses/Spring-2000/CIS830

·          Instructor’s home page: http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~bhsu

 

Note: It is the student’s responsibility to be aware of class announcements and materials posted on the official class page, so please check it frequently.

Course notes

Required readings, along with reference manuals and tutorials for software used in the course, will be available for purchase (in 2 packets) from the Engineering Copy Center in 14 Seaton Hall.

Class web board

·          URL: http://ringil.cis.ksu.edu/Courses/Spring-2000/CIS830/Board

·          Primary purpose: for class discussions (among students and with instructor)

Note: Postings on the web board will tend to get a more rapid response from the instructor than e-mail, besides which, they are sometimes of benefit to fellow students.

Mailing list

·          Tentative title: CIS830WHH-L@cis.ksu.edu

·          Optional (no course-critical announcements)

·          For research announcements, related job opportunities, etc.

·          Sign up if interested

 

Homework Assignments and Course Project

Homework assignments will be given out 2 to 3 weeks apart, for a total of 4.  Your lowest score will be dropped (see below).  One of these homeworks will be programming-based; one will require you to run (and possibly modify) an existing library or KDD package using a specification or sample data, and analyze the results; and two will be written.

 

Type (do not hand-write) homeworks; handwritten solutions are worth 0.8 credit.

 

For programming assignments and the course project, you are permitted to use your choice of a high-level programming language (C++ and Java are strongly preferred; consult the instructor if you intend to use any other programming language).  You must, however, use a development environment that is available to the CIS department.  Consult the class web page for approved compilers.

 

The course project proposals will be due on Monday, February 14, 2000 and will count for 20% of the project grade.

 

For graduate students and advanced undergraduates interested in working on a class project, you may elect an additional 1 hour of credit as a section of CIS 798 (Special Topics in Computer Science) and either turn in a term paper or work on an extension of the course project or a small-scale independent study project.  You may sign up for this option any time before February 14, 2000 (talk to me during office hours or send e-mail).  Suggested project topics and guidelines will be posted on the course web page.  Examples include: improving a known supervised learning algorithm; developing an algorithm for combining classifiers; a KDD application of DBMS or OLAP, in support of an MSE concentration in database systems; a project on analysis of time series or document databases (e.g., text or source code); an in-depth comparison of two KDD techniques studied in the course; or improving an existing model or analyzing it formally.

 

No-Cheating Policy

Cheating consists of misrepresenting another’s work or knowledge as your own.  It includes not only copying of test answers, but plagiarism of another person’s written material.  While you are encouraged to discuss class material, homework problems, and projects with your classmates, the work you turn in must be entirely your own.  For homework assignments, this means that if you work together with a fellow student, you should still produce the final, written material from your own notes and individual work, rather than from common notes that you produced together.  You should follow similar guidelines for programming assignments and individual projects; while reuse of previously developed source codes may be permitted in these cases (provided you acknowledge the authors appropriately), you must not use directly use code developed by fellow students.  Please consult the University honor code (http://www.ksu.edu/honor) for further guidelines on ethical conduct, and understand the regulations and penalties for violating them.

 

The codes that you are permitted to use on certain assignments may be limited, beyond the specifications of plagiarism standards.  When in doubt about whether you may use a particular program on a written or programming assignment, consult the instructor first.  My objective is to help you learn as much as possible from the assignments; sometimes this means that I want you to use existing code and sometimes I will prefer for you to develop it yourself, to better understand the techniques.

 

Grading

                Credit for the course will be distributed as follows:

 

Component

Quantity

Low Scores Dropped

Points Each (Out of 1000)

Value

Homework (Written/Programming Assignments)

4

1

100

30%

Paper Reviews and Commentaries

20

5

10

15%

Presentation

1

0

150

15%

Midterm Exam (Take-Home, Open-Book)

1

0

150

15%

Course Project (Due May 5, 2000)

1

0

250

25%

 

                Homework and exams may contain extra credit problems.

 

Late policy: Homeworks are due at 5:00pm on Fridays; you may request an extension to the following Monday if you need one by the due date (but I recommend you do not take this option).  10% credit will be deducted for each day the assignment is late past 5:00pm that Monday.  There will be no additional extensions!

 

Letter grades will be assigned based on the distribution of raw scores (“curved”). Undergraduate and graduate students will be graded on the same curve.  Acquiring 85% of the possible points, however, guarantees an A; 70%, a B; 55%, a C.  Actual scales may be more generous than this if called for, but are not expected to be.

 

If you elect to take an additional CIS 798 project option (for 1 hour of credit), your grade for CIS 830 will still be assigned based only on the above components.  The additional project component will be graded separately (as CIS 798) and weighted proportionately.

 

Schedule for Homeworks

1.       Assigned Monday, January 31, 2000, due Friday, February 25, 2000

2.       Assigned Monday, February 28, 2000, due Friday, March 17, 2000

3.       Assigned Monday, March 27, 2000, due Friday, April 7, 2000

4.       Assigned Monday, April 10, 2000, due Friday, April 28, 2000


Paper Reviews and Commentaries

 

An important part of learning about intelligent systems and knowledge discovery in databases, whether for research or development applications, is understanding the state of the field and the repercussions of important results.  The readings in this course are designed to give you not only a set of tutorials and references for machine learning tools and techniques, but to demonstrate the subject as a unified whole, and to encourage you to think more deeply about the practical and theoretical issues.

 

Toward this end, I have selected 4 papers out of those in your (2) course notes packets.  The first 2 of these are in the first packet and the last 2 are in the second.  Before you come to lecture on the dates indicated on the class calendar, you should submit (by e-mail to the instructor) a short review of, and commentary on, the assigned paper.  This commentary need be no longer than 2 pages (though you can go up to 3 pages if you feel you have something meaningful to add).

 

This review is an important part of the course, because it can:

 

·          help you to review and rehearse material from lecture

·          bring to light questions that you may have about the material

·          improve your ability to articulate what you have learned

·          help guide the lecture/discussion

·          help you to think about working on projects (implementations or research) in this field

 

        Here are some guidelines on writing the reviews:

 

1.       Try to be brief and concise.

2.       Concentrate on pointing out the paper’s main strengths and flaws, both in content (key points, accuracy, impact/implications, deficiencies) and in presentation (organization, clarity/density, interest).  Try not to merely summarize the paper.

3.       Some questions to address (typically a couple in each paper):

·          Is the paper of sufficiently broad interest?  What do you think its intended audience is?  To what audience do you think the paper is significant?

·          What makes the paper significant or insignificant?

·          How could the presentation be improved to better point out important implications?

·          Is the paper technically sound?  How so, or in what areas is it not entirely sound?

·          What novel ideas can we pick up (about the topics covered in lecture) from the paper?

·          Comment on how the paper (or the topic) affects your own work.  How is it relevant (or irrelevant) to you?

4.       How might the research be improved in light of how the field has progressed since it was published?  Some of these papers were catalysts for research in their areas, so it is sometimes infeasible to second-guess their authors; but comment on what could be done better today.

 

Paper reviews are late (worth 0 credit) after midnight of the day of the lecture when they are due (i.e., you must submit them before 12:00am Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday).

 

Do not plagiarize.  It is relatively easy to detect plagiarism of material from the paper itself, related references, and paper reviews of classmates!  Again, refer to http://www.ksu.edu/honor for regulations and further guidelines on academic honesty.