Welcome to the On-Line Guide to CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING designed and maintained by Roman Barták. I have opened this site as an on-line tutorial or, if you want, a textbook for beginners to the area of constraint programming. This area belongs to the less known software technologies but it rapidly evolves and brings a significant commercial interest.

Last August, Sebastian Thrun, the brains behind Google's self-driving cars and one of the world's top AI experts, offered an online version of Stanford's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to absolutely anyone who wanted to take it, for free. It turned out to be just a little bit popular (over 150,000 students enrolled), and now Thrun is offering a new, totally free, seven-week online course called Programming a Robotic Car. Can I really learn how to build a self-driving car in 7 weeks? In seven weeks, you will learn the basics of all the primary systems involved in programming a robotic car. Mad props to Professor Thrun for staying focused on the camera and barely glancing once at where the car was taking him.

An example of object detection and recognition application. Classifier networks are used to inspect, sort, identify, and discriminate minute details in biological or machine systems that human beings cannot discern. They are used in everything from inspecting spark plugs to face recognition. Classifier networks are becoming the basis of machine vision systems. The students' projects are designed to give them practical experience, and to ground graduate students in the field so that they are able to perform this type of research.

We describe a variety of projects developed as part of a course in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Minnesota. The projects cover navigation of small mobile robots and learning to accomplish simple tasks, and require a variety of approaches from neural networks to genetic programming to reactive behaviors. The projects have all been implemented on real robots. We discuss how the combination of robotics with Artificial Intelligence adds value to the learning of AI concepts and how the fun of building and programming a robot is a highly motivating force for the learning process. 1 Introduction The major goal of this paper is to describe examples of integration of real robotics projects in a course in Artificial Intelligence. The examples presented here are some of the class projects done by students taking a course in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Minnesota.

Sum-product networks have recently emerged as an attractive representation due to their dual view as a special type of deep neural network with clear semantics and a special type of probabilistic graphical model for which inference is always tractable. Those properties follow from some conditions (i.e., completeness and decomposability) that must be respected by the structure of the network. As a result, it is not easy to specify a valid sum-product network by hand and therefore structure learning techniques are typically used in practice. This paper describes the first online structure learning technique for continuous SPNs with Gaussian leaves. We also introduce an accompanying new parameter learning technique.

Here you will learn how to define the optimization problem for SVMs when it is not possible to separate linearly the training data.

On lengths of yarn stretched between chairs, sixth-grade math students were placing small yellow squares of paper, making number lines--including everything from fractions to negative decimals--in a classroom at Walsh Middle School. Their teacher, Michele O'Connor, had assigned the number lines in previous years, but this year was different. She, personally, hadn't spent much time leading students through practice problems or introducing the basic math concepts they would use in the project. That had largely been relegated to online math lessons, part of separate periods of learning time when students were free to work through computer-based lessons in any subject they chose, at their own pace. The change at Walsh, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, is part of a nationwide pilot program, one that could indicate just how deeply and how quickly the personalized-learning trend will penetrate the average classroom. Indeed, despite the buzz around personalized learning, there's no simple recipe for success, and the common ingredients -- such as adaptive-learning technology and student control over learning -- can backfire if poorly implemented. A looming question is whether personalized learning that works in, say, a tight-knit, mission-driven charter school can be reliably translated into traditional district schools with many more students, less flexible schedules, keener standardized-test worries and cultures steeped in established ways of teaching and learning.

An example of whistleblower behaviour taken from Harry McLaren's slides Workplace surveillance is nothing new, but this slide from Harry McLaren's talk on Machine Learning for Threat Detection illustrates particularly well the challenges facing journalists wishing to protect whistleblowers. McLaren is talking about malicious threats, and the way that machine learning can be used to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour. But the example given above is equally useful in illustrating the way that similar behaviour might be used to identify an employee intending to whistleblow on illegal, unethical or dangerous behaviour by his or her organisation. Data Loss Prevention (DLP), network forensics, and content management technologies are already being used to prevent such leaks, but machine learning adds a new dimension to the field. The point for journalists is that collections of small actions – including those which protect the whistleblower – can be just as compromising as obvious oversights like a lack of information security.

Embedding making, political analysis, and intelligence analysis; morality when handling preferences and dealing models of biomedical argumentation in research journals with the potential and risks of big data were identified and popular media; annotation of rhetorical figures; as challenging endeavors for the future.