Heuristic Search and Rational Agents

Wheeler Ruml
Palo Alto Research Center

Faculty Candidate

Friday, February 16, 2007
11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Fuller Labs 320

Heuristic search is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence concerned with solving combinatorial optimization problems. Heuristic search techniques are often used when building an autonomous agent---for example, to find the best sequence of actions to perform in order to achieve a desired goal. Agents that maximize the expected usefulness of their actions are called `rational.' After introducing heuristic search, I will discuss recent work that turns this conventional paradigm on its head. Instead of just using search to build a rational agent, we can use concepts of rational agency to construct the search algorithm itself. This approach is especially promising for settings in which one is willing to sacrifice provably optimal solution quality in return for faster running times.

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Dr. Wheeler Ruml a member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he is manager of the Embedded Reasoning Area in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory. His main research focus is on combinatorial search and optimization. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University. He was the co-winner of the PARC Golden Acorn Award for most valuable patent of the year in 2005. He is a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and co-chair for the Seventh Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA-07).

Host: Michael Gennert

Refreshments will be served.

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Last modified: Mon Jan 22 17:22:20 EST 2007