Study-Unit Description

Study-Unit Description


CODE ICS1020

 
TITLE Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

 
UM LEVEL 01 - Year 1 in Modular Undergraduate Course

 
MQF LEVEL 5

 
ECTS CREDITS 5

 
DEPARTMENT Artificial Intelligence

 
DESCRIPTION Artificial intelligence has been described as the study of how to get machines to do the things that humans do best. This study-unit introduces fundamental concepts in Artificial Intelligence from a theoretical, practical and cognitive point of view. Numerous topics will be tackled in an effort to provide a broad introduction to the rapidly-developing filed of AI covering a range of approaches, namely:
- Classical and modern approaches to AI;
- The principal achievements and shortcomings of AI;
- The main techniques that have been used in AI, and their range of applicability;
- Ethics of AI;
- Challenges for the future of AI.

AI research and development is active in each area, but each area has different ideas about whether AI will be successful ranging from systems that are intelligent in the same way that humans are intelligent to systems that can be considered intelligent because a human is satisfied that, regardless of how the system solved the problem, the result is the same that a human would have produced.

Study-Unit Aims:

The aims of this study-unit are to:
- Introduce students to the rationale for AI approaches to problem solving by covering situated AI techniques and typical problems that AI Systems try to solve. The study-unit aims to touch on a number of areas like:
- Intelligent Agents;
- Ethical issues related to AI;
- Knowledge Representation and Reasoning;
- Problem solving and search;
- Planning and Sequential Decision Making
- Probability and Bayes Networks;
- Natural language processing;
- Computer Vision;
- Machine Learning;
- Multi-agent Systems and Game Theory;
- AI and Robotics.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Knowledge & Understanding:
By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- Explain in simple terms what kinds of problems are considered AI problem;
- Explain why there are different approaches problem-solving in AI;
- Identify which AI techniques are appropriate for solving various typical AI problems;
- Distinguish between different AI techniques to solve the same AI problem;
- Distinguish between Artificial Intelligence, Software Development and Computer Science and discover for which domain they have an aptitude;
- Design and implement solutions to simple AI Problems.

2. Skills:
By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- Use any of the AI techniques covered to solve simple problems;
- Compare the appropriateness of a number of AI techniques to solve simple problems;
- Represent facts and knowledge using different knowledge representation schemes;
- Formulate a proposal for a group project that includes multi-faceted aspects of AI;
- Identify and analyse potential ethical issues emerging from the proposal;
- Analyse, design and provide conceptual solutions to typical AI Problems.

Main Text/s and any supplementary readings:

Main Texts:

- Russell S. and Norvig P., (2021). “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach”, 4th Edition, Pearson.
- Poole, D. and Mackworth, A. (2017). “Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Ai” Second Edition. Cambridge University Press. Available online at https://artint.info

 
STUDY-UNIT TYPE Lecture and Independent Study

 
METHOD OF ASSESSMENT
Assessment Component/s Assessment Due Sept. Asst Session Weighting
Project SEM1 Yes 50%
Examination (2 Hours) SEM1 Yes 50%

 
LECTURER/S Josef Bajada (Co-ord.)
Vanessa Camilleri
Alexiei Dingli

 

 
The University makes every effort to ensure that the published Courses Plans, Programmes of Study and Study-Unit information are complete and up-to-date at the time of publication. The University reserves the right to make changes in case errors are detected after publication.
The availability of optional units may be subject to timetabling constraints.
Units not attracting a sufficient number of registrations may be withdrawn without notice.
It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2023/4. It may be subject to change in subsequent years.

https://www.um.edu.mt/course/studyunit