DIVISION OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CS 282. Probabilistic Reasoning

MW 1:00-2:30 or 2:30-4:00

MW 323

Instructor

Name Email Telephone Office Hours
Avi Pfeffer avi@eecs.harvard.edu 496-1876  Tu, 2-4pm, Maxwell Dworkin 251 

If you are unable to make the instructor's office hours, please send email to make an appointment.

Syllabus

Announcements:

There will be two sections for this class, both in MD 323. The first will be MW 1:00-2:30, and the second MW 2:30-4:00. Find out what section you are in here.

Objective Caml and IBAL are now installed on the FAS servers. To use them, add ~cs282/bin to your path. If you want to install IBAL yourself, you will first need to install Objective Caml, available from the Caml home page. Then download the current IBAL distribution and follow the installation instructions there. The IBAL distribution will be periodically updated during the semester. I will announce when that happens.

IBAL Tutorial

For now, you will need the sections on "Basic Concepts", "Types and Data Structures", and "Defining Variables". The tutorial, like IBAL, is a work in progress. Please let me know if there is anything you find confusing.

Upcoming readings:

Copies of upcoming readings will usually be available outside my office, MD 251.

  • Review: Chapter 3 of my thesis, providing a quick overview of Bayesian networks.

  • Mon Sep 23rd: Pearl, "Probabilistic Reasoning for Intelligent Systems", chapter 3, up to end of 3.2.2.

  • Wed Sep 25th: Pearl, remainder of chapter 3.

  • Mon Sep 30th: Pearl, chapter 4 to page 184
  • Wed Oct 2nd: Pearl, pages 195-210, and Peot & Shachter, "Fusion and propagation with multiple observations in belief networks".

    Questions on Readings