Talk, Thesis and Proposal Announcements by TIP Members

Change and Planning in Chance Discovery

Abstract: A ‘chance’ is a piece of information about an event or a situation with significant impact on decision-making of humans, agents, and robots. A ‘chance’ is also a suitable time or occasion to do something. A chance may be either positive –an opportunity or negative –a risk. For example, predicting a looming earthquake represents a “chance discovery”.
    Many approaches have been applied to chance discovery. Chances (risks or opportunities) can be discovered from our daily observations and background knowledge. A person can easily identify chances in a news article. In doing so, the person combines the new information in the article with some background knowledge. Hence, we develop a deductive system to discover relative chances of particular chance seekers. We propose a chance discovery system that uses a general purpose knowledge base and specialized reasoning algorithms.
 

               Planning for Spatiotemporal Utility-based Agents

            Using Causal Knowledge to Guide Case Retrieval and Adaptation in Case-based Reasoning about an Industrial Process.

            Qualitative Spatio-temporal Representation & Reasoning for Vague Regions

Abstract: Commonsense reasoning about motion and spatio-temporal change in general enables mobile agents to perform useful tasks in the real world. Motion is nothing but changing one’s location over time. Therefore, in order to be able to perform commonsense reasoning tasks about motion, there is a need to represent and reason about space, time and space-time in a fashion that enables commonsense reasoning. In other words, represent them in a qualitative fashion. Making realistic applications that represent and reason about spatio-temporal concepts such as motion requires having realistic assumptions about the world. This introduces many elements into the application, one of which is the issue of vagueness, as geographical objects do not usually have well-defined boundaries. We present an extension of an existing spatio-temporal theory to incorporate the possibility that regions under study have vague boundaries. We formulate an ontology, along with reasoning techniques to build a qualitative reasoning engine for vague spatio-temporal regions.

Robocup 2004

Abstract: The Robocup research project aims at promoting research in various areas of AI through two standard problems that integrate different technologies and foster research in different directions. The first is Robocup soccer whose aim is for a soccer team of robots to win over a team of humans, and the second is the Robocup rescue project that concentrates on developing agents that can perform rescue tasks at a disaster space. In this talk we present these two central problems, their history, research directions and current status. We also present our team's experience in developing rescue agents and our participation as well as achievements in the 2004's Robocup held in Lisbon, Portugal.

Copyright Ahmed Tawfik 2002-2006
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Last updated: July 27, 2006.