Program W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy Computer Science Courses 400. An introduction to the technical, social, economic, and political aspects of graduate education in computer science at Rochester. Class meetings consist primarily of group discussions and presentations that focus on a broad range of topics, and are intended to improve the critical analysis, technical writing, presentation, and problem-solving skills of students. Both class discussions and written assignments are drawn from material presented in other first-year graduate courses offered within the department. The course also offers a forum for individual department faculty members to discuss their research interests and recent results.
Satisfactory performance is required of all first-year computer science graduate students.
The focus of the course is the problem of quantifying the uncertainty that characterizes most inference outside of logic and mathematics. This is important to both philosophy and artificial intelligence. The various probabilistic and non-probabilistic measures that have been proposed will be explored and evaluated. Readings of various authors and lectures provide the material. Class discussion, short homework papers, and a final paper constitute the method.