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Current research in the field of artificial intelligence with emphasis on cooperative agents, distributed agents, and decision making in complex, concurrent environments. AI programming in a distributed environment. [from the Cal Poly Catalog 2005-07]
This course explores the topic of intelligent agents. It discusses the differences between agents and conventional computer programs, investigates different types of agent architectures, and examines various important aspects and applications of intelligent agents in more detail.
Prerequisites: CPE/CSC 481 (Knowledge-Based Systems) and graduate standing, or consent of the instructor.
Knowledge of Java is expected for homework assignments and term projects.
The goal of the course is to understand important problems, challenges, concepts and techniques dealing with the use of intelligent agents for computational tasks. Upon satisfactory completion of this course, the student will:
In order to achieve these goals, students learn how to analyse, design, implement and evaluate intelligent agent programs and systems of varying complexities. The core aspect of these systems is to offer support to human users, in particular with relatively tedious or possibly dangerous tasks that are difficult or impossible to solve with conventional technology.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no suitable textbooks available for this course. Most of the books and articles on "intelligent agents" are research monographs, or collections of research papers. Textbooks on Knowledge-based Systems and Artificial Intelligence mostly concentrate on questions related to the representation and manipulation of knowledge through computers and various techniques used for that purpose, but not so much on aspects that distinguish intelligent agents from traditional artificial intelligence approaches.
The following books contain some interesting chapters, and are suitable for specific topics. The schedule for the course contains pointers to those chapters under the respective topic.
Some agent environments are based on the Jess system, which is described in
For more material on Jess and CLIPS (an earlier version of an expert system shell with which Jess is mostly compatible), see the CPE/CSC 481 Syllabus.
Further material will be made available through handouts in class, and through pointers to relevant Web pages.
| Assignments | 20% |
| Individual Presentation/Paper | 40% |
| Team Project | 40% |
The table gives an overview of the calculation of the grades. I reserve the right, however, to change the formula used. Please note that the project consists of several parts that will be evaluated separately. The project will also be done in teams, and the performance of the team as a whole will be graded unless there is a clear disparity in the contribution of the individual team members. Should this be the case, I might ask for additional documentation like work sheets, email messages, or draft copies of documentation to evaluate individual contributions.
| FJK Home | CPE/CSC 580 | Syllabus | Schedule | Lecture Notes | Assignments | Project | Teams | Other Links |
| Franz Kurfess |