CS 269 - Seminar: Current Topics in Artificial Intelligence: The Concrete Mathematics of Automated Reasoning

Instructor: Professor Guy Van den Broeck <guyvdb@cs.ucla.edu>

Course Description

Automated reasoning is a subfield of artificial intelligence concerned with building efficient deductive algorithms that allow for answering queries in knowledge bases. When such knowledge bases are probabilistic, reasoning algorithms often require solving complex summations over exponentially many possible worlds. This course studies the mathematical foundations of such counting problems, though the lens of what Knuth et al. call "concrete mathematics". We will investigate the mathematics of solving sums, recurrences, binomial coefficients, the use of generating functions to reason about structure in counting problems, and various other topics in discrete mathematics. Furthermore, we will connect these foundational concepts to algorithmic problems that arise in automated reasoning in AI.