Conference Program

Keynote: Yaacov Choueka, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
www.cs.biu.ac.il/~choueka/

Title: You’ve come a long way, Baby! Responsa meet Full-text and CL, one-thousand-year manuscripts meet AI

Abstract: The Responsa Project, a full-text retrieval system for the Responsa and other major corpora of Rabbinical literature, was recently awarded the prestigious Israel Price for 2007. Yaacov Choueka, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and one of the two main leaders and developers of the project, will present interesting highlights from the project history, including research problems confronted by the developers well before they were studied by the research community at large, and will conclude with some hints about AI problems related to a new project on Computers and Jewish Studies - The Friedberg Genizah Project - he is now directing.

Keynote: Dana S. Nau, University of Maryland, US
www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/

Title: May All Your Plans Succeed! (Or Have a High Expected Utility)

Abstract: Automated planning technology has become mature enough to be useful in applications that range from game-playing to control of space vehicles. In this talk, Dr. Nau will discuss where automated-planning research has been, where it is likely to go, where he thinks it *should* go, and some major challenges.  The presentation is an updated version of Dr. Nau's invited talk at AAAI-05.

Keynote: Milind Tambe, University of Southern California, US
teamcore.usc.edu/tambe/

Title: Multiagent and Agent-human Teamwork: Hybrid Approaches

Abstract: How do we build multiagent systems? Today, within the agents and multiagent systems community, we see four competing approaches: logic-based belief-desire-intention (BDI), decision-theory and its incarnation in distributed Markov decision problems (distributed MDPs or POMDPs), distributed constraint optimization and finally, auctions or game-theoretic approaches. While there is exciting progress within each approach, there is a lack of cross-cutting research. This talk will outline a case for hybrid approaches as we scale to complex multiagent domains. In particular, for the past decade, the TEAMCORE research group has focused on building agent teams in complex, dynamic domains. While our early work was inspired by BDI, we will present an overview of recent research that uses DCOPs and distributed POMDPs in building agent teams. While hybrids of DCOP and distributed POMDPs have helped us address problems of efficiency and expressiveness, game-theoretic considerations have helped build a new family of DCOP algorithms. Finally, in our BDI-POMDP hybrid approaches, BDI team plans are exploited to improve POMDP tractability, and POMDPs improve BDI team plan performance. We present some recent results from applying these hybrids to complex domains such as teams of software personal assistants for office environments and agent teams for disaster rescue simulations.

Keynote: Manuela M. Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, US
www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv

Title: Selective Use of Multiple Sources of Robot Sensory Information

Abstract: An autonomous robot needs to assess the state of the environment, make decisions towards achieving its goals, and execute the selected actions. In teams of autonomous robots, robots have individually limited perception, but can communicate state information to each other creating therefore multiple perceptual inputs. We present an algorithm for selectively merging and using the own perceptual data combined with the communicated data from teammate robots. In general, robots face the challenge of combining multiple sources of sensory information. We illustrate different concrete instances of this problem and discuss a prioritized approach to effectively merge multi-modal information. The talk will be organized as an explanation f the algorithms underlying a series of different robot videos, including robot soccer players, humanoid robot soccer commentators, and machine visual object recognition.

Keynote: Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, UK
www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~mjw/

Title: Logic for Automated Mechanism Design – A Progress Report

Abstract: Over the past few years, strategy logics such as Coalition Logic and ATL have proved to be a powerful formal tool for representing and reasoning about the properties of game-like mechanisms such as social choice procedures. These logics share the same technical heritage as CTL-like temporal logics, which have proved to be amenable to automation, and have been shown to be extremely useful in the analysis and verification of reactive systems via model checking. We believe that in exactly the same way, model checking tools for strategic logics will prove to be of similar value in the automated analysis and verification of social choice procedures. In this talk, we present a survey of our work in this area. We begin by introducing ATL-like logics, and demonstrating that they form a natural tool for the specification of social choice procedures. We show how ATL model checkers can be used to verify economic properties of social choice mechanisms. We then discuss the main issues required to turn this vision into a reality, focusing on issues such as the succinct representation of social choice rules, the complexity of reasoning with such representations, and the handling of preferences.

This talk will report joint work with Thomas Agotnes (Bergen), Wiebe van der Hoek (Liverpool), Marc Pauly (Stanford), and Paul E. Dunne (Liverpool).