CS/ENGRI/INFO/COGST 172, FALL 2005:
COMPUTATION, INFORMATION, AND INTELLIGENCE

Knowledge without appropriate procedures for its use is [mute], and procedure without suitable knowledge is blind. -- Herbert A. Simon, "Artificial Intelligence Systems that Understand" (1977)

Instructor: Prof. Lillian Lee (see homepage for contact information)
Lecture time and location: MWF 10:10-11:00am, Hollister 110

General course description

  1. Problem solving, or, Deep Blue's (de)feat against Kasparov and the myth of brute force: problem-space design; breadth-first and depth-first search; minimax; pruning
  2. Learning, or, the van that learned to drive itself: neural nets and the perceptron convergence theorem; kernel methods; nearest neighbors
  3. Language, or, a computer that understands you like your mother: Boolean and vector-space approaches to information retrieval; Web structure, PageRank, and hubs and authorities; text categorization; machine translation; statistical learning in infants; language models and context-free grammars; stack-based discourse models
  4. Computability, or, the unexpected hanging: Turing machines; the uncomputability of the halting function
  5. The Turing Test, or, the ultimate final exam: Turing's proposal; the Chinese Room; the Loebner prize
This is not a programming course; rather, "pencil and paper" problem sets are assigned, for the focus of the course is on algorithmic concepts and mathematical models.

Prerequisites and related info: Some knowledge of differentiation required; permission of instructor required (and in the past, generally granted) for students who have completed the equivalent of COM S 100. See the 8/26/05 lecture-aid handout for procedure and the Formal Course Description and Policies for more information.

Administrative information and resources

Lectures

See the Formal Course Description and Policies section on course materials for web-posting policy and handout accesibility.

Note that the conversion program used to post the handouts to the web causes the web versions to use more space or pages than those handed out in class, but the content should be identical.

Lecture 1
8/26
A breezy intro, touching on blender science, true programmability, and the romance of AI Handouts: (1) "Introduction to CS and AI " lecture aid, (2) Formal Course Description and Policies, (3) background survey.
Lecture 2
8/29
Problem solving and problem spaces; specification by explicit enumeration Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 3
8/30
More on specifications; implicit specifications Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 4
9/2
More on implicit specifications Handouts: (1) lecture aid; (2) tip sheet
Lecture 5
9/5
Systematic search Handouts: (1) lecture aid; (2) weekly office-hours schedule
Lecture 6
9/7
Depth-first and breadth-first search; games Handouts: (1) lecture aid; (2) Homework One
Lecture 7
9/9
Games; pruning Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 8
9/12
Pruning; Deep Blue Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 9
9/14
Introduction to learning; perceptrons Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 10
9/16
Perceptrons as linear separators; learning perceptrons in the on-line setting Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 11
9/19
The perceptron convergence theorem Handouts: (1) lecture aid; (2) Homework Two
Lecture 12
9/21
Practice with perceptrons; the perceptron convergence theorem, continued Handouts: (1) lecture aid; (2) Homework One Solutions
Lecture 13
9/23
The perceptron convergence theorem, concluded; further analysis of the PLA Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 14
9/26
Introduction to information retrieval; B-trees Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 15
9/28
The vector-space model; term-frequency weighting Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 16
9/30
Tf-idf weighting Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Prelim info and temporary changes in office hours (3) Reading: Broder et al, 2000, " Graph Structure in the Web" (we distributed excerpts)
Lecture 17
10/3
The bowtie structure of the Web Handouts: (1) Midterm and solutions from 2002 (2) Solutions to Homework Two parts A, B, and D
Lecture 18
10/5
Models for power-law in-degree distributions on the Web Handouts: (1)lecture aid (2) Solutions to Homework Two part C (3) Chakrabarti et al., 1999, "Hypersearching the Web"
"Lecture" 19
10/7
Prelim One  
Lecture 20
10/12
Finish models of in-degree distribution; using links to enhance IR Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Solutions and statistics for Prelim One (3) Homework Three
Lecture 21
10/14
PageRank and hubs-and-authorities (HITS) Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 22
10/17
Deeper into PageRank; comparison with hubs-and-authorities Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Reading: Lee, 2004, " 'I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that': Linguistics, statistics, and natural language processing circa 2001"
Lecture 23
10/19
From IR to NLP Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Four
Lecture 24
10/21
Language structure Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 25
10/24
Context-free grammars Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 26
10/26
Earley's parsing algorithm Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Three solutions
Lecture 27
10/28
Learning grammars: the bigram case Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Three solutions
Lecture 28
10/31
The poverty of the stimulus and the sparse data problem; Jelinek-Mercer smoothing; intro to machine translation Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Four solutions, parts A and C (3) Homework Four solutions, part B
Lecture 29
11/2
Statistical machine translation Handouts: lecture aid
no "lecture"
11/4
Prelim Two  
Lecture 30
11/7
Statistical machine translation (cont.) Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Five (3) Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996): Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants
Lecture 31
11/9
Statistical learning in infants  
Lecture 32
11/11
Statistical segmentation of Japanese Handouts: (1) announcements and followups (2) lecture slides
Lecture 33
11/14
Grosz and Sidner discourse theory Handouts: lecture aid
Lecture 34
11/16
Grosz and Sidner, continued Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Kleinberg and Papadimitriou (2004), Computability and Complexity
Lecture 35
11/18
Attentional structure in discourse; begin computability Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Turing (1950), "Computing Machinery and Intelligence " (3) Searle (1980), "Minds, Brains, and Programs"
Lecture 36
11/21
Turing machines Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Homework Six
Lecture 37
11/23
The halting function Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Solutions to Homework Five
Lecture 38
11/28
Review and further directions (I)  
Lecture 39
11/30
Review and further directions (II) Handouts: (1) final exam guide (first page) (2) Sample problems and solutions
Link: course evaluation site
Lecture 40
12/2
Turing tests Handouts: (1) lecture aid (2) Solutions to Homework Six
(thanks to Dr. A. Holland-Minkley for formatting idea)