Decision Making And Plan Management By Autonomous Agents: Theory, Implementation And Applications

Dr. Subrata Das
Charles River Analytics
Cambridge, MA

Friday, April 23, 1999
11 a.m.
Fuller Labs 311

In collaboration with John Fox, Imperial Cancer Research Fund, London, UK

A generic architecture for autonomous agents is presented. In common with other current proposals the agent is capable of reacting to and reasoning about events which occur in its environment, and of executing actions and plans in order to achieve goals in the environment. In addition, the agent can make decisions under uncertainty, including decisions about competing beliefs and alternative actions. The framework is grounded in a non-classical decision model; this supports many more capabilities than classical decision theory, but under restricted conditions it is compatible with classical decision theory. The model is embodied in a well-defined knowledge representation language, R2L, which explicitly supports the central concepts of decisions and plans, and associated constructs of goals, arguments and commitments. The language provides a sound basis for building knowledge based agents for practical applications including safety-critical ones. This is illustrated with examples of medical applications.

About the speaker:

Currently a Senior Scientist at Charles River Analytics Inc., Dr. Das' major research interests are in the areas of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, symbolic decision-making, Bayesian belief networks, planning, and database systems, including relational, logic and object-oriented databases. He is currently leading projects for the Army, USAF and NASA in the areas of agent- based information filtering and retrieval for situation assessment, agent-based information visualization, and interface agent learning. As a research fellow at the Imperial College in London, Dr. Das has led research efforts for the development of multi-agent systems for distributed planning, scheduling and resource optimization. Dr. Das' previous research affiliations include the Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London and the Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, where he worked in the areas of logical formalization of knowledge-based decision support, and multi-user relational database systems. He is the author of the book entitled "Deductive Databases and Logic Programming" published by Addison-Wesley, and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on the Systematic Design of Intelligent Systems to be published by AAAI/MIT Press.

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