This paper argues for the introduction of real-world programming projects into AI curricula, specifically using Python as an implementation language. We describe a modular set of projects centered around a focused web crawler, along with potential extensions. The author’s experiences using this project in a class of undergraduates and Master’s students are also discussed.

The seasonal abundance of woolly apple aphid (Eriosoma lanigerum Hausmann) was studied from 2005 to 2008 in commercial orchards in central Washington State. There was a single period of crawler migration on the tree trunks each year lasting from 7 to 16 wk. The peak period of crawler activity ranged from early June to late July, although peaks in June were more common. In one orchard, peak dens...

The rapid growth of the World-Wide Web poses unprecedented scaling challenges for general-purpose crawlers and search engines. In this paper we describe a new hypertext resource discovery system called a Focused Crawler. The goal of a focused crawler is to selectively seek out pages that are relevant to a pre-defined set of topics. The topics are specified not using keywords, but using exemplar...

BACKGROUND Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) are a useful tool that helps physicians to make clinical decisions as the healthcare moves towards the practice of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). The fast growing World Wide Web has provided a place for physicians to share their appraised topics online, but an increasing amount of time is needed to find a particular topic within such a rich reposito...

A mechanisms used for large scale accessibility measuring may involve a distributed web crawler. Furthermore, it makes sense to spread the web sites involved to di erent access points (crawler locations / crawler nodes) of the distributed crawler. We will in this publication present an algorithm utilising the available resources to a much greater extent than the traditional uniform distribution...

The application fields of autonomous mobile robots recently extend from indoor uses to outdoor uses. Rescue systems and planetary explorations are typical examples for such outdoor mobile robots. In such field, it is required to have both of rapid movement and adaptive function to rough terrain, while general wheel mechanisms are not suitable for such rough environments. To move in these enviro...

As the Web continues to grow rapidly, focused topic-specific Web crawlers will gain popularity over traditional general-purpose search engines for locating, indexing and keeping up to date information on the Web. This paper presents YAFC (Yet Another Focused Crawler), a neurodynamic programming approach to focused crawling. YAFC combines TD(λ) reinforcement learning with a neural network to lea...