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Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in AI

Instructor: Lenhart Schubert

N.B.: Updating of this site from 2021 to 2022 is currently in progress

Classes: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:40am-10:55am, Hylan 102

Office Hours: Tues 5:00-6:00pm & Thu 5:00-6:00pme

Office: WEGMANS 3003

e-mail: my-last-name at cs dot rochester dot edu

Grad TA: Pranay Mundra (p last-name at ur dot rochester dot edu) Pranay's 244/444 home page

UG TAs: Draco (Yun Long) Xu (y last-name 103 at u dot etc), Riya Sharma (r first-4-letters-of-last-name 26 at u dot etc)

TA Office hours (Pranay): Mon 10:30-11:30am, 2:00-3:00pm, WH 2305

Goals of the course

The main goal in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in AI is to learn about techniques for representing factual knowledge (typically, the sort of knowledge that we can easily express in ordinary language, though also some kinds of knowledge calling for specialized representations, such as temporal, taxonomic, & 3D spatial relations), and using such knowledge for making inferences (deductive or uncertain), and for planning courses of action to achieve goals. Students will thereby gain an appreciation of the fundamental role that knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) play in intelligent cognition.

Practically speaking, students will reach the point where they can write programs for basic KR&R tasks, and make sense of the current research literature in this area; CSC 444 students will also learn about a subtopic of their choice in greater depth, by completing a project based on reading some recent papers or books and (perhaps) writing programs that implement some ideas they have.

Prerequisites

The standard prerequisites are CSC 173 (computation & formal systems) and CSC 242 (a general course on AI). A solid math background and basic knowledge of logic and programming may suffice as well (check with instructor). Some prior exposure to functional programming (esp. Scheme, Lisp or Haskell, or basics of lambda-calculus) can be advantageous.

Credit

The grade for the course will be based on homeworks assigned every other week, plus three Lisp programming assignments, a midterm and final test, and, for 444 students, a research/essay project. See the course schedule for % weights. For any further grading details, see the grad TA's homepage for 244/444 (when it becomes available).

Here is a link to a pdf file providing guidelines for the graduate project (to be brought up to date by Sep. 13).

The text and supplementary texts are

The following are a couple of brief in-house introductions to Common Lisp:
         Lisp Intro (LKS),    Lisp Tutorial (GK)

Here is a lecture-by-lecture Course Schedule . The assignment hand-out and turn-in dates are firm.

Latex'd notes will be provided for a majority of the topics in the class, along with more sketchy slides.
Here is a link to the Lecture Notes, to be gradually developed; and here are corresponding Slides.

Some supplementary notes and interesting links: