CPSC 631 - Programming Environments in AI:
Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Fall 2007

Professor: Dr. Thomas R. Ioerger
Office: 322C Bright Bldg.
Phone: 845-0161
email: ioerger@cs.tamu.edu
office hours: make appointment by email

Meeting: Tues/Thurs, 3:55-5:10, 104 Bright

Course Web Page: http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/ioerger/cs631-fall07/index.html

Prerequisites: CPSC 625 (Artificial Intelligence) - or an equivalent AI course as an undergrad

Textbooks

The textbook used in the course (which will be liberally supplemented with papers from the literature) will be:

Other good textbooks on agents:

Grading

The course will be primarily project-based, and grades will be based on the quality of the projects implemented.

Goals of this Course

To learn about extended topics in AI, with a focus on intelligent agents. Specifically, we will cover the following major topics/perspectives:

  1. Agents: characteristics, environments, and architectures
  2. Multi-Agent Systems and Cooperative Behavior


Schedule:


Tues, Sep 4: Agent characteristics, environments, and applications
Thurs, Sep 6: Agent architectures; read Ch 1-2 in Wooldridge, Ch. 2 in Russell and Norvig
Tues, Sep 11: read Ch. 3 in Wooldridge; knowledge-based agents; example of decision-making in Prolog
Thurs, Sep 13: read AOP (Shoham, 1990); discussed epistemic and temporal logics and their role in decision-making
Tues, Sep 18: practical reasoning, planning, and intentions in agents
Thurs, Sep 20: Planning
Tues, Sep 25: (class cancelled)
Thurs, Sep 27: BDI and modal logic; read Ch 12 in Wooldridge
Tues, Oct 2: Rao and Georgeff (1991)
Thurs, Oct 4: Cohen and Levesque (1990)
Tues, Oct 9: MDP's, read Ch. 17 from Russell and Norvig; also read Ch. 6 from Wooldridge
Thurs, Oct 11: example of solving an MDP using value iteration, policy iteration, and linear programming
Tues, Oct 16: games, strategies, and equilibria
Thurs, Oct 18: auctions
Tues, Oct 21: negotiation
Thurs, Oct 23:
Tues, Oct 30: contract nets (Smith, 1980)
Thurs, Nov 1: bidding with marginal-costs (Sandholm, 1993), leveled commitments (Sandholm and Lesser, 2002)
Tues, Nov 6: project 1 demos!
Thurs, Nov 8: partial global planning, Durfee and Lesser (1987), Ephrati and Rosenschein (1994)
Tues, Nov 13: Reinforcement Learning: A Survey. Kaelbling, Littman, and Moore (1996).
Thurs, Nov 15: coalition formation; (Rosenschein and Zlotkin, 1994)
Tues, Nov 20: (Shehory and Kraus, 1995)
Thurs, Nov 22: (Thanksgiving)
Tues, Nov 27: DCSP (Yokoo and Durfee, 1998)
Thurs, Nov 29: voting
Tues, Dec 4: ???


References


Links