ASU 101

Instructor: Subbarao Kambhampati

Lecture Notes & Audio & Video (Fall 2010)

Course Goals: To get you to understand ASU/Fulton/CSE culture and resources; to philosophize on how to be successful at ASU/Fulton/CSE; to give you an idea of career paths in CSE; and to give a high-level overview of some neat ideas in CSE.

1. Introduction ( Here is the audio of the lecture)
   • Blurb on ASU
   • Blurb on Fulton
2. Algorithms, Efficiency and Complexity
   • Lecture of Week 2 on differentiating between hard and easy problems (Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 3 on general ASU issues+decidability and undecidability (Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 4 on problem reductions; boolean satisfiability; phase transition phenomena (Video) (Audio).
3. Search Engines & Social Networks
   • Lecture of Week 5 on Search engines and similarity computation (Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 6 on Search engines (contd.); discussion on course taking strategies (depth-first rather than breadth-first traversal of pre-requisite tree); discussion of blog questions, understanding precision and relevance; understanding vector similarity metric; (Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 7; discussion career paths in CS, and computational thinking; continuing discussion of search engines. Inverted indexes; server farms; tf/idf ( Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 8; Concluding discussion of search engines. Anchor Text; Link Analysis (page rank; authorities-hubs) ( Video) (Audio).
4. AI and programming Intelligent Agents
   • Lecture of Week 9: Definitions of Artificial Intelligence; performance metrics; Parts of agents (sensors, goals, effectors, environments), and properties of environments (Video) (Audio).
   • Lecture of Week 10: What makes an environment hard vs. easy; designing intelligent agents--reflex agent; state tracking agent; goal-based agent. (Video) (Audio).