Welcome to the IT3708 web page!
This course aims to introduce the students to so-called subsymbolic methods and concepts in AI, particularly artificial neural networks and evolutionary algorithms.
On these pages you will find relevant static information regarding the course. It's Learning is also used to a certain extent, so check those pages as well.
Students who follow the course should check the news section regularly.
Latest News
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Course Overview
This course introduces several artificial intelligence methods that
involve more quantitative calculation than symbol manipulation. The
two key sub-symbolic methodologies that will be covered are evolutionary
algorithms (EA) and artificial neural networks (ANN), both of which
are derived from biological principles.
EAs use the evolutionary biological metaphor of Darwinian natural
selection as the basis for stochastic parallel search through complex
fitness landscapes. This powerful search technique has been applied to
a host of problem domains, such as task-scheduling, controller
design, pattern recognition, robotics, immunology, economics and machine
learning. In addition, EAs are commonly used in artificial life
(alife), an exciting new interdisciplinary area with strong connections to
biology, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and engineering. We
will focus on two types of EAs: genetic algorithms (GA) and genetic
programming (GP).
Neural networks are powerful machine-learning tools
abstractly based on the behaviors of collections of neurons in the
brain. They are exceptionally useful in learning general concepts
from examples, in either a supervised mode (i.e. the system is told
which class each example belongs to) or unsupervised situations, where
the ANN has to cluster the examples based on similarity.
The distributed nature of information in neural
networks makes them fundamentally different from standard AI knowledge
representations and very popular as models of memory and as tools for
complex data-analysis tasks in a wide variety of domains.
People
Lecturer: Keith Downing (keithd<at>idi.ntnu.no)
Office: Room 308 IT-Vest
Phone: (73 5)9 02 71
Teaching Assistant: Boye Annfelt Høverstad (hoversta<at>idi.ntnu.no)
Office: Room 361 IT-Vest
Phone: (73 5)5 10 17