Cognition
Artificial Intelligence: Principles and Techniques
Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a huge impact in many areas, including medical diagnosis, speech recognition, robotics, web search, advertising, and scheduling. This course focuses on the foundational concepts that drive these applications. In short, AI is the mathematics of making good decisions given incomplete information (hence the need for probability) and limited computation (hence the need for algorithms). Specific topics include search, constraint satisfaction, game playing,n Markov decision processes, graphical models, machine learning, and logic.
Decision Making under Uncertainty (AA 228)
This course is designed to increase awareness and appreciation for why uncertainty matters, particularly for aerospace applications. Introduces decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective and provides an overview of the necessary tools for building autonomous and decision-support systems. Following an introduction to probabilistic models and decision theory, the course will cover computational methods for solving decision problems with stochastic dynamics, model uncertainty, and imperfect state information. Topics include: Bayesian networks, influence diagrams, dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, and partially observable Markov decision processes. Applications cover: air traffic control, aviation surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, and robotic planetary exploration.
Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning (LINGUIST 284, SYMSYS 195N)
Methods for processing human language information and the underlying computational properties of natural languages. Focus on deep learning approaches: understanding, implementing, training, debugging, visualizing, and extending neural network models for a variety of language understanding tasks. Exploration of natural language tasks ranging from simple word level and syntactic processing to coreference, question answering, and machine translation. Examination of representative papers and systems and completion of a final project applying a complex neural network model to a large-scale NLP problem.
Reinforcement Learning
To realize the dreams and impact of AI requires autonomous systems that learn to make good decisions. Reinforcement learning is one powerful paradigm for doing so, and it is relevant to an enormous range of tasks, including robotics, game playing, consumer modeling and healthcare. This class will briefly cover background on Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning, before focusing on some of the central problems, including scaling up to large domains and the exploration challenge. One key tool for tackling complex RL domains is deep learning and this class will include at least one homework on deep reinforcement learning.
Multi-robot Control, Communication, and Sensing
Survey of current research topics in multi-robot systems including multi-agent consensus, formation control, coverage control and sensor deployment, collision avoidance, cooperative mapping, and distributed Bayesian filtering. Students will develop skills in evaluating and critiquing research papers, and will conduct a final research project.