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TITLE: Market Mechanisms for Agent Coordination
PRESENTER: Sven Koenig, http://idm-lab.org/, skoenig@usc.edu
AFFILIATION:Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, http://www.cs.usc.edu/
DATE: Monday 11th December 2006
TIME: 12:00:00
PLACE: CSE Seminar Room, Level 1, K17
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will give an overview of our research on
market mechanisms for the allocation of resources in
cooperative domains. As example, I will use exploration
tasks where a team of mobile robots needs to visit a number
of given targets in known or partially unknown terrain. An
important characteristic of these multi-robot routing tasks
is that the assignment of targets to robots can turn out to
be suboptimal as the robots gain more information about the
terrain. Auctions promise to assign and re-assign targets to
robots efficiently in terms of both the required amount of
computation and communication since information is
compressed into numeric bids that the robots can compute in
parallel. I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of
different auction mechanisms, including recent theoretical
results that show that sequential single-item auctions can
provide constant factor performance guarantees in known
terrain even though they run in polynomial time. This is
joint work with D. Kempe, P. Keskinocak, M. Lagoudakis,
V. Markakis, A. Meyerson, C. Tovey and our students.
BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:
Sven Koenig is an associate professor in computer science at the
University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. degree in
computer science from Carnegie Mellon University for his dissertation
on "Goal-Directed Acting with Incomplete Information." He also holds
M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie
Mellon University and is the recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service
Award, an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, a Charles
Lee Powell Foundation Award, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award,
a Fulbright Fellowship and the Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize from
the University of California at Berkeley. Several of his students won
awards for their research as well.
Sven is interested in intelligent systems that have to operate in large,
nondeterministic, nonstationary or only partially known domains. Most of
his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and
learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or
decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in
their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time,
even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment,
imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or
insufficient reasoning speed. He believes that finding good solutions
to these problems requires approaches that cut across many different
fields and, consequently, his research draws on areas such as artificial
intelligence, decision theory, and operations research. Applications
of his research include planetary exploration, supply-chain management,
medicine, crisis management (such as oil-spill containment), robotics
and real-time games (entertainment, serious games, training and
simulation).
Sven has edited several conference proceedings and published more than
100 papers in various areas of artificial intelligence and robotics,
including 15+ full-length papers at AAAI and IJCAI (the two main
artificial intelligence conferences), as well as papers in planning
(ICAPS, AIPS, ECP), agents (AAMAS, Autonomous Agents), machine learning
(ICML, COLT), numerical artificial intelligence and control (NIPS,
UAI, AI and Mathematics), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR),
robotics (ICRA, IROS, RoSS), and others. He was conference co-chair
of the 2002 Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation
(SARA), conference co-chair of the 2004 International Conference on
Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), and program co-chair of
the 2005 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and
Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). He is an associate editor of the Journal
of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), a member of the editorial
board of Computational Intelligence, a member of the steering committees
of ICAPS and SARA, and a former member of the advisory committee of
Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems. He co-founded Robotics:
Science and Systems (RoSS), a highly selective robotics conference,
in 2005 and is program co-chair of the 2007 AAAI Nectar program.
Sven is passionate about helping students and young researchers to get
a good start in their careers. On the high-school level, he repeatedly
represented the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
as a judge at ISEF, which brings together over 1,400 high-school students
from more than forty nations. On the university level, he often serves as
external member on dissertation committees, was three times co-chair
of the AAAI student abstract and poster program, often participates as
panelist or mentor in doctoral consortia of artificial intelligence
conferences, is a member of paper award committees of major artificial
intelligence conferences, and frequently presents tutorials about his
research at summer schools and conferences. He co-organized the first,
second, third and fourth USC Programming Contests in 2005 and 2006 and
trained USC students for the Regional ACM Programming Competitions,
where they placed 5th out of 66 teams in 2005 and 2nd out of 70 teams
in 2006.
In his spare time, Sven used to care for more than fifty newts from all
over the world. He is also a member of the Academy of Magical Arts at the
Magic Castle in Hollywood, but has not yet managed to make all (or even
some) of his work disappear. His Erdös number is two.
Seminar information is also available at
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/db/ai/seminars/list/index.html
Host:
Toby Walsh
Seminar Convenor:
Van Hai Ho
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