Artificial Intelligence
Foundations of Computational Agents
Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents is about the science of
artificial intelligence (AI). It presents AI as the study of the design of intelligent com-
putational agents. The book is structured as a textbook, but it is accessible to a wide
audience of professionals and researchers.
The past decades have witnessed the emergence of AI as a serious science and
engineering discipline. This book provides the first accessible synthesis of the field
aimed at undergraduate and graduate students. It provides a coherent vision of the
foundations of the field as it is today, in terms of a multidimensional design space
that has been partially explored. As with any science worth its salt, AI has a coherent,
formal theory and a rambunctious experimental wing. The book balances theory and
experiment, showing how to link them intimately together. It develops the science of
AI together with its engineering applications.
David L. Poole is Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.
He is a coauthor of Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach (1998), cochair of the
Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), and coeditor
of the Proceedings of the Tenth Conference in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (1994).
Poole is a former associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.Heis
an associate editor of Artificial Intelligence and on the editorial boards of AI Magazine
and AAAI Press. He is the secretary of the Association for Uncertainty in Artificial
Intelligence and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence.
Alan K. Mackworth is Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair
in Artificial Intelligence at the University of British Columbia. He has authored more
than 100 papers and coauthored the text Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach.
He was President and Trustee of International Joint Conferences on AI (IJCAI) Inc.
Mackworth was vice president and president of the Canadian Society for Compu-
tational Studies of Intelligence (CSCSI). He has served as president of the AAAI.
He also served as the founding director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational
Intelligence. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, AAAI,
and the Royal Society of Canada.
