Artificial Intelligence (AI), is concerned with getting machines to behave humanly: to learn, and discover on the basis of experience; to speak, to hear, to hold conversations in English or Maltese; to adapt to circumstances in a flexible way. In short, AI studies the problem of building intelligent agents that behave like you and me.

In a more general sense, Artificial Intelligence seeks to define solutions to complex problems which may only be specified vaguely or abstractly and which do not, at first sight, appear to have a clear computational solution. As we raise our expectations concerning the performance of computers, more problems fall into this category. Examples include the automatic discovery of relationships between genes within the field of Bioinformatics, the mining of semantic information from the Internet, or learning to clean up the kitchen after a party.

AI, and its inherent relationship to computer science, are first explored during the second year of the undergraduate programme. In subsequent years, and at postgraduate level, the student can profit from the Department's active involvement in several different areas of specialisation including user-adaptive systems, bioinformatics, machine learning, web science, human language technologies, search and information retrieval, and game playing.

On behalf of all members of the Department, I look forward to your participation.