Concept Taxonomy for Intelligent Software Agents Course
Here's a summary of the 12 concept classifiers with their definitions:
1. Programming Fundamentals
Concepts related to core programming skills, languages, and data handling that form the technical foundation for agent development. This includes Python programming, data structures, function definitions, and exception handling.
2. Agent Theory
Theoretical concepts describing the nature, capabilities, and classification of software agents. This covers agency levels, autonomy, computational entities, and the spectrum of agent capabilities from basic to advanced.
3. Knowledge Representation
Concepts focused on how information is structured, stored, and made accessible to agents. This includes ontologies, semantic networks, frames, and the trade-offs between different representation approaches.
4. Tool Engineering
Concepts related to creating, documenting, and managing the functions that agents can call to interact with external systems. This covers tool design, documentation standards, naming conventions, and APIs.
5. LLM Implementation
Technical concepts specific to large language models, their architecture, deployment, and operation. This includes model types, inference techniques, context management, and transformer architecture.
6. Security & Safety Framework
Concepts focused on ensuring agent systems operate responsibly and securely. This includes sandboxed environments, controlled imports, error handling, and validation of agent outputs.
7. Performance & Optimization
Concepts related to improving speed, efficiency, and resource utilization of agent systems. This covers GPU optimization, token generation rates, latency reduction, and computational resource management.
8. Knowledge Integration & Reasoning
Concepts addressing how agents combine information sources and perform logical reasoning. This includes retrieval augmented generation, reasoning mechanisms, knowledge base integration, and inference.
9. User Interaction & Experience
Concepts centered on how agents communicate with and serve users. This includes interface design, natural language understanding, content generation and refinement, and understanding user goals.
10. Agent Development
Practical implementation concepts for building agent systems. This includes agent frameworks, integration patterns, deployment strategies, and specialized implementations like code agents and multi-agent systems.
11. Midterm and Capstone Projects Ideas
These are the concepts associated with possible midterm an d end of course capstone project ideas that students might work on. This list is highly variable and will depend on student interests an school budgets.
12. Miscellaneous
Use this category if a concept does not fit into the prior categories.
These classifications provide a comprehensive framework for organizing the 200 concepts in the course, highlighting the multidisciplinary nature of intelligent software agent development spanning from theoretical foundations to practical implementation considerations.