Greetings:

I have just posted a second forum, but this time, I want your candid answers about intelligence natural and artificial. What you write in this forum
will be a baseline for the next forum. That's precisely the reason to ask for candor in your statements.

Get used to participate in forums. In this forum and the next I will not intervene for I want to see your debating abilities.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:

Some of you did or could not attend class on the 15th of January and so, may not be aware of the fact that this course is going to be asynchronic
for the most part, i. e., you will be receiving links to videos, the detailed script of my own videos and presentations, reading assignments from the
textbook and other sources, and other similar activities. Occasionally, I will send you a link to Google Meet with date for meeting for class at the
hour scheduled during enrolment and registration. Attendance to those synchronous lectures is compulsory and I may take attendance.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear students:

The first forum interventions have impressed me quite positively. As I have suggested, there will be a second forum on AI and promises to be
very exciting based on the answers I've seen. Of course, I won't intervene in neither for my intention is to assess your skills for debate.

Keep up the enthusiasm!

Fernando

I thought this was a good synthesis of the technology developed over the last 100 years-

Dear Students:

Some of you may have realized that I posted a second forum about natural vs artificial intelligence, but this time you are expected to show your
abilities for debating. In this forum, you should investigate literature about artificial intelligence, including science fiction, and contrast that with
literature about natural intelligence covering concepts like mind, thought and thinking (process), and the more controversial of all from my point
of view, consciousness and conscience. You will surely come across other aspects like feelings, creativity and ingenuity and related to these last
two, knowledge. What is knowledge? How does knowledge emerge or is built?

This topic will probably lead you into unknown territory, but this debate should remain neutral to beliefs. You should use all your abilities for
reasoning and seeing opposite points of view, assembling argumentation to persuade, or reach agreements.

As before, I'll abstain from participating to avoid biasing your debate

Dear students:

Thanks to your messages I have uncovered many inconsistencies in Moodle. As soon as I am alerted of these issues, I try to fix or compensate for
them. One of you wrote to me about the AI Introduction Forum 1 and helped me see the strange use of the term "due". In Forum 1 after the
description of the forum, the following sentence appears:

"The due date for posting to this forum was Wednesday, 20 January 2021, 7:57 PM."

That sentence would have been clear if it said "The forum was open for posting on Wednesday, 20 January 2021, 7:57 PM." That said, Moodle
does not display what they call the cut-off date, in other words, the date the forum closes. The only way to know when a forum closes is to go to
the calendar and look for "AI Introduction Forum 1 should be completed".

Since this caused confusion and given that in this forum you should post your candid view of natural vs artificial intelligence, I decided to move
the cut-off date of that forum to January 29, one minute before Cinderella's time. Those of you who did not post in this forum, you have until
Friday 29 January to participate.

Lesson learned: always search in the course calendar the cut-off dates for the forums to make sure you participate in all the forums.

Best regards,
Fernando

Dear students:

Structural or syntactic ambiguity in natural languages is common. Let me give you a few examples:

Visiting aunts can be a nuisance.

Hospital fired 7 foot doctors.
Police squad helped dog bite victims.
John saw the thief with his telescope in the park.

Currently available probabilistic parsers fail to detect it and produce only the most likely parse, but this may have serious consequences in system
requirement and legal documents, for example. My Natural Language Processing (NLP) research team is interested in developing parsers to
detect ambiguity and produce all the possible syntactic structures. Currently, we have successfully developed deterministic parsers for declarative
sentences and are advancing towards developing this parser for other types of sentences, like interrogative, exclamative and imperative sentences,
as well as sentences with relative clauses. We are also interested in carrying out research on probabilistic parsers that produce the different
structures for an ambiguous sentence together with their likelihood.

Our NLP team meets on Thursdays from 4:30-6:00 PM. If any of you are interested in joining our research team, please send me an email. We'll
start our meetings this semester on February 4.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear students:

Structural or syntactic ambiguity in natural languages is common. Let me give you a few examples:

Visiting aunts can be a nuisance.

Hospital fired 7 foot doctors.
Police squad helped dog bite victims.
John saw the thief with his telescope in the park.

Currently available probabilistic parsers fail to detect it and produce only the most likely parse, but this may have serious consequences in system
requirement and legal documents, for example. My Natural Language Processing (NLP) research team is interested in developing parsers to
detect ambiguity and produce all the possible syntactic structures. Currently, we have successfully developed deterministic parsers for declarative
sentences and are advancing towards developing this parser for other types of sentences, like interrogative, exclamative and imperative sentences,
as well as sentences with relative clauses. We are also interested in carrying out research on probabilistic parsers that produce the different
structures for an ambiguous sentence together with their likelihood.

Our NLP team meets on Thursdays from 4:30-6:00 PM. If any of you are interested in joining our research team, please send me an email. We'll
start our meetings this semester on February 4.

Regards,

Fernando

Hi everybody:

I'm attempting to make this course as pleasant and engaging as possible, so I have spent quite a bit of time developing videos for each chapter.
This is a very time-consuming task, but eventually I hope to achieve my goal.

Last year, I had not developed videos for the first few chapters, but later on, due to the pandemic, I had to rush and develop some videos. Of
course, as I develop more and more videos over time, I am learning a lot of tricks-of-the-trade, and getting better at that (hopefully :-).

This video is the result of applying all I have learned over the course of 9 or 10 months, so in my opinion, it's my personal best, but you'll be the
judge of that. As in any course I teach, I am all ears for your criticism, suggestions, and comments. There is always room for improvement.

Finally, I'm running behind schedule in the course, so I'll try to catch up.

Regards,

Fernando
Dear all:

I saw that not all of you had participated in the second forum of the introduction chapter. For this and last time, I have extended the cut off date
till Monday 8 23:59. I expect you take this opportunity to participate. You need to read the instructions of the forum because if you do not meet
the requirements of this forum you will not get full credit.

Regards,

Fernando

Hi everybody:

I have just posted a quiz about the chapter on problem solving agents. This is a timed quiz, so make sure to carefully review the script about
agents before attempting to solve the quiz.

Best,

Fernando

Hi there:

I have just posted the first programming homework assignment of the semester: Programming homework assignment Chapter 2 - Agents.

Carefully read the instructions. You have one week to submit it. In the mean time, I will be posting advances in chapter 3 during this week.

Regards,

Fernando

I have just posted the most up-to-date version of the chapter 3 presentations and scripts and it includes all the algorithms for uninformed search. I
will continue working on the rest of the chapter and I expect to finish with the release 5. That will conclude this chapter and I will post a
homework assignment and some quizzes.

Fernando

Dear Students:

I created a forum "Forum for Project Ideas and Teams Organization" which was intended to discuss projects ideas and watching the
commonalities in ideas, start forming project teams. However, I was checking today your participations in the forums and in this one, there is
none.

It is becoming more and more critical for you to define your ideas of projects so that you can review relevant techniques, and I guiding you in
your approaches and solutions.

Please, start pouring your ideas in that forum.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:

I have to apologize for my silence of this week and not updating the course, but my wife, who in many respects is my legs, arms, and driver due
to my physical impairments, was operated on last Tuesday March 9. The nature of the ocular surgery is such that she needs to stay face down for
one to two weeks. I have had to take care of most of our house chores which at my pace take very long. That has consumed my full days.
Fortunately, one of our daughters is arriving tomorrow to Puerto Rico and will help us for 10 days.

I have notified the Director of the Department and I will compensate gradually over the course of the next weeks for the delays of this week, and
hopefully get back on track with the course. I thank you for your your patience and understanding of this personal situation.

Best regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:
My life is sort of normal at least until my daughter is in our home. So I have added a final quiz for chapter 3. In this quiz, you need to carry out
some calculations to determine whether or not some heuristic functions for a graph are admissible, and consistent. That's why the quiz requires
you to complete viewing the slides about solving problems by search which is the full contents of chapter 3 of the course.

I will be posting a programming assignment by tomorrow for this chapter. Due to the difficulties my TA has had reviewing your previous
programming assignment, make sure for this one to upload at least two files: one file either pdf or docx with your analysis of the results, and one
zip file with the code of your assignment.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:

I have just posted the second programming assignment of this course. Please read the instructions carefully so that your submission is complete.

Besides the assignment, I have allowed you access to two videos of chapter 4 which are followed by questions to probe your understanding of the
videos.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:

I have posted one more video on heuristic search, i. e., search in continuous spaces. I have also added some questions about simulated annealing,
genetic algorithms and local beam search. These questions are in preparation for several quizzes on the topics of this chapter that will be posted
tomorrow.

On Friday I will release the last video of this chapter with questions and quizzes that will be due on Monday April 5. The first partial exam will
be held on April 7. The exam will have a duration of 1 hour, and will be available from 8:30 AM to 6:30 PM. The exam will be about all chapters
covered till Friday March 26, i. e., chapters 1 through 4.

The exam will have one part with theoretical questions of several types, true/false, multiple choice, matching, and fill in the blanks; the other part
will have two problems for which you will need to show your process and calculations.

Best regards,

Fernando

Hi everybody:

I have just made available the rest of the videos of chapter 4 and quizzes that will help you prepare for the exam, You will have next week to
study and solve the quizzes. At any rate, feel free to contact me next week to answer your questions and make clarify any doubts about the
subject.

As you may remember, my official office hours are Mondays 2:00 - 5:30 PM but you can contact me any time through email or Moodle
messages.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear students:

I have received messages from some of you about an error in the Genetic Algorithms quiz. I will look into this, and if indeed there is an error, I'll
make sure your quizzes grade are not affected by that error.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear students:

First of all, I'll be posting the solution for the two problems of the exam shortly.
Second, only one of you has posted his idea for the project. It is imperative that you start putting your ideas on the forum so that I can give you
feedback about whether or not the idea is a feasible project for the course, or not. Also, you may tag along someone else's idea or ideas. We will
figure out how to distribute the teams if more than three people want to do the same project. In case two or more groups work on the same project
idea, all of the groups need to use different approaches to solve the problem.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear students:

I can only say that I am really worried about your projects. I had set the deadline to participate in the forum on the 31 of March with a powerful
reason: The last day to offer any major evaluation this semester is April 28, that is 20 days from now, which is quite insufficient for any
interesting project. Only one of you submitted his idea on March 8. For that reason, I had to send a reminder two days ago. One more person
posted his idea today. It seems to me that there is a lack of interest in the course.

At this point we all are at a crossroads, because I feel no project of interest can be done in 20 days or less. That is forcing me to assign groups of 3
students at random and assign the same project for all the teams, with one exception.

I'll be posting the teams and project over the weekend.

Hi everybody:

I will post in a few minutes the guidelines for the project of the course. Only two of the five ideas posted in the forum are adequate for the course
project, efficient node search in a 3D mesh, and city navigator. It would be very difficult for the three remaining ideas to become realistic projects
to do in 19 days. Thus, the rest of the groups will have to design an agent that plays checkers. I will choose the groups at random except for the
ones that posted ideas on the forum.

You will see a topic appear with all the instructions for the project report, video presentation and demonstration.

Regards,

Fernando

Dear Students:

I have just posted an additional video on Adversarial Search with time constraints. I also want to announce that there will be no more
programming assignments to help you concentrate on and advance in your projects. Remember also that there is a forum called Q&A about your
projects. Use it to post your questions and difficulties you may be experiencing in your projects.

I will also post in the coming days a forum of a controversial topic. I hope you participate in this forum.

Regards,

Fernando