CSC 290 Subtopics for Group Projects

Most project themes should be chosen from the following topics, or in consultation with the instructor.
Miscellaneous pointers or comments are included with some of the subtopics; these should not be taken too seriously -- they are just things found "by accident" or by cursory googling. More will probably be added incrementally. When you choose a topic, you'll research it much more thoroughly! One goal will be to find the best system that can be obtained and demonstrated to the class, in the chosen subfield.

Understanding stories and descriptions in NL

Engaging in NL dialogue

Representing and reasoning with common-sense knowledge
The goal is eventually to match humans in making common-sense inferences about the kinds of things
(people, places, objects, beliefs, events, etc.) everyone knows about. See e.g., Common Sense Problem Page,
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora/cs/

Playing intellectually challenging games

Uncertain inference

Forming and reasoning about goals and plans
(see last 2003 issue of JAIR -- special issue on planning, based on papers from IPC 200.)

Automated mathematical reasoning and theorem proving
David M. Kaiser, Playing games with theorem provers,
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dliang/CSci8980/Projects/TheoremProvers.htm
Selmer Bringsjord et al. at Rensselaer claim to have a system MARMML that solves deductive, inductive,
creative, and visual inference problems:
http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/marmml/MARMML.REAL.RPI.v3.ppt

Autonomous discovery, concept formation

The knowledge acquisition bottleneck -- acquiring propositional knowledge about the world

Computer assisted learning/tutoring/instruction/education
One random item: D.G. Moursund, Brief Introduction to Educational Implications of Artificial Intelligence,
2003 (an on-line book, it seems)
http://www.uoregon.edu/~moursund/AIBook/ai-contents.htm

Computers and law -- esp. computer judges
One potentially interesting article: H.J. van den Herik, The Future World of AI,
http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~herik/presentations/future%20of%20AI.pdf.

Music composition
See papers on EMI; also Robert Rowe, "The future of AI and music" (which also refers to a 2001 book by
Rowe, "Machine Musicianship"),
http://students.washington.edu/shrecg/aimusic/future.html

Computer-generated art

Bioinformatics
Try the following (though it timed out when I tried):
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/slides/

Swarm intelligence, multi-agent problem solving

AI through ALife (artificial evolution, genetic programming, ...)
The Golem project at Brandeis, by Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, is tangentially relevant (though there's
no real concern with intelligence here; but there's a good "Further reading" list at the end):
http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/.
One person, Karl Tiedemann, suggests that neural nets developed through genetic programming are the way
to achieve AI:
http://www.karlt.com/blog_archives/000018.html

AI through quantum computers
e.g., see Subhash Kak's web page,
http://www.ee.lsu.edu/kak/home.html.


Last Change: 04 March 2004 / schubert@cs.rochester.edu