CMSC 471 - Fall 2007

News

• 12/11: The final tournament results are now posted on the project website. Congratulations to the four teams that tied!
• 9/24: Since many of you have other classes during my original office hours, I've decided to move my Wednesday office hours to make myself more available to you. The new schedule will be: Monday 2:30pm-3:30pm and Wednesday 11:30am-12:30pm.
• 9/19: I've updated the homework 2 assignment with information on how to turn in your code to cs471 hw2 using submit. It must be submitted by 1:00pm on the due date (the start of class), otherwise it is considered late.
• 8/29: Everyone currently enrolled in the course has been added to the mailing list. If you haven't received a welcome message from the list, you need to subscribe manually as described in the syllabus.
• 8/29: Our room assignment has changed to ITE 233. Same time, better place. The syllabus and website have been updated to reflect the move.
• 8/28: Welcome to AI! As things change on the website, I'll post updates here.

Course Info

• Course Description and Syllabus
• Lecture Schedule and Assignments
• Course Resources

Contact Info and Office Hours

• Eric Eaton (Instructor)
  • Offices: ITE 220, ITE 339. (I will be in ITE 220 during my scheduled office hours. If you need to find me other times, you can find me in my research lab, ITE 339.)
  • Office Hours: Monday 2:30pm-3:30pm, Wednesday 11:30am-12:30pm in ITE 220, and by appointment.
  • E-mail:


• Aaron Curtis (Teaching Assistant)
  • Office: ITE 353 (ext 5-8963)
  • Office Hours: TuTh 1:00-2:00pm
  • E-mail:

Useful Resources

• Software
  • CLISP, a public-domain implementation of Common Lisp that is installed on the department's Unix machines (/usr/local/bin/clisp). You can also download it for Linux, Windows, or Mac (I've never tried the Mac version, so let me know if you get it to work!).
  • The Weka Machine Learning Toolkit, a widely-used open-source ML toolkit built in java. You should download your own copy for either Linux, Windows, or Mac. Since it's java, you can download it to your home directory on the UMBC systems and run it.


• Lisp References
  • Common Lisp manual (Steele 2nd edition)
  • Marty Hall's Common Lisp tutorial at JHU/APL


• LaTeX Resources
  • A basic introduction to LaTex (tex, pdf).
  • The sample document from the introduction (tex, pdf).
  • Math in LaTeX (tex, pdf).
  • LaTeX Websites
    • LaTeX Project home page
    • LaTeX Project FAQ
    • CTAN: the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
    • The AMS maintains several widely used extensions of LaTeX. The amsmath package provides just about every math symbol you can imagine, and more.
    • Simplified LaTeX, a beginner's guide with a nice tutorial section at the beginning.
    • In order to run LaTeX on your own computer, you will need to install TeX and LaTeX. A number of freeware and shareware implementations are available. You can look through the CTAN or LaTeX Project websites above for pointers. If you're running Windows, you might want to try the MikTeX implementation. Excellent LaTeX-friendly text editors for Windows include WinEdt or TeXnicCenter