This specialist course focuses on acquiring a deep understanding of foundational AI principles and techniques to model complex real-world problems and to formulate algorithms to solve them. The course will start with an introduction to AI that defines core AI concepts, provides the philosophical foundations of AI and discusses ethical issues in this field. The course continues by covering intelligent agents and classical search to then move to local search and optimisation algorithms. The course ends with adversarial search and constraint satisfaction problems. All topics will be covered from a theoretical point of view, during the lectures, and from a practical point of view during the labs.