CA742

SOFTWARE AGENTS

Prerequisites: CA 710

Outline:

1. Definitions – History – Intelligent Agents – Structure – Environment – Basic Agents - Formulating – Search Strategies – Intelligent search – Game playing as search. Knowledge Based Agents.

2. Representation – Logic – First order logic – Reflex Agent – Building a knowledge base – General Ontology – Inference – Logical Recovery - Planning Agents.

3. Situational Calculus – Representation of Planning – Partial order Planning – Practical planners – Conditional Planning – Replanning Agents - Agents and uncertainty.

4. Acting under uncertainty – Probability Bayes Rule and use – Belief Networks – Utility Theory – Decision Network – Value of information – Decision Theoretic Agent Design - Higher level agents.

5. Learning agents – General Model – Inductive learning – Learning Decision Trees – Reinforcement Learning – knowledge in learning – Communicative agents – Types of Communicating agents – Future of AI.

Books:

1. Nils.J.Nilsson, Principles of Artificial Intelligence, Narosa Publishing House, 1992.

2. Jeffrey M.Bradshaw, An Introduction to Software Agents, MIT Press, USA 1997.