CIS341 AI Projects 2006

The main assessed work for this course is a project report as detailed below.

Important: if you want to propose a project which does not come under one of the topics listed on this page, you must email me with your proposed title by Wednesday March 1st, explaining how your topic is relevant to the course, and you should not proceed with the project until I have agreed to it.

The main report can be either:

• an extended research-based essay of up to 3,500 words, with a separate list of references, or
• a programming project report of up to 3,500 words; you should also submit
  • a printout of your source code
  • a copy of your code on diskette or CD
  • clear instructions on how to run your program
  Important:
  • Your project must be able to run on the departmental lab PCs without any additional software;
  • The project must be coded in Prolog, Jess or Java, unless I have already agreed that you can use a different language.
  • For MSc students, the maximum wordcount is 5,000.

The project is to be handed in on Monday April 24th 2006.

You should choose a project topic within one of the areas listed below. You will be required to produce a detailed proposal as part of Assignment 2 which is due to be handed in on Wednesday March 22nd.

Programming Projects

1. Expert System in Jess. See AAAI website: AI Topics, Expert Systems for background information. Your ES should include a knowledge base of if-then rules in a domain of your choice and should implement the following as a minimum:
   • forward-chaining
   • backward-chaining
   • queries
2. Definite Clause Grammars building on the lab exercises to extend the grammatical coverage and/or including semantic analysis. Suitable topics include:

   Coordination

   which is problematic for Prolog's top-down parsing strategy, e.g.

   1. John visited Edinburgh and Glasgow
   2. John likes fish and Mary likes chips

   "Unbounded dependencies"

   which are problematic for context-free grammars, e.g.

   1. Pavarotti likes a fish that Loren says she thinks Silvio hates.
   2. What fish did Loren say she thinks Silvio hates?

   One way to tackle this would be to consolidate your solutions to the lab exercises, including the new Exercise 6 on relative clauses. Useful readings include:
   • Internet Grammar of English
   • Relevant chapters in Callan, Russell and Norvig.
   • Prolog and Natural Language Analysis by Pereira and Shieber.
   • The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker.
3. Bayesian Network: implement a simple network incorporating Bayesian inference, as described in e.g., the relevant chapters in Bratko, Russell and Norvig, Callan or this tutorial paper by Eugene Charniak.
4. Search: applying informed/heuristic search methods to a suitable problem, e.g. route finding. There will probably be a relevant lab exercise later in the term.

Research Topics

1. Philosophy of AI: can computers think, will they ever be able to; does it make sense to talk of computer systems having beliefs and intentions? See AAAI website: AI Topics, Turing Test.
2. Case study of a major AI application, such as Nasa's Remote Agent system that operates an unmanned space probe

Important notes

• All projects must relate to one or more of the core topics in the CIS341 syllabus:
  • Formal grammars for natural language
  • Logic, knowledge representation and inference
  • Search and problem solving
  • Planning
  • Philosophy of AI
• The content of your project must not overlap with your BSc project. If the topic is related to your BSc project, you should make clear in both reports how the two pieces of work are related.

Dr Rodger Kibble
Dept of Computing
Goldsmiths