Research Areas
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated planning and control

Research Description
My research is centered around my interest in making machines "smarter." Machines are very far from rivaling humans in tasks such as visual understanding, language processing, forming scientific theories, computer administration, tutoring, etc. Nevertheless, I believe that even small steps toward solving such tasks will yield systems that people take for granted and depend on in everyday life. My general career vision is to support this progress by studying the critical computational problems that arise.

My research interests are in the artificial intelligence areas of machine learning, automated planning, and knowledge representation. I am most interested in usefully integrating these complementary areas.

One of my research thrust is to develop machine-learning algorithms for highly-structured data types such as graphs and sequences. This research has been applied to video interpretation and we are now considering new applications areas, e.g. pen-based input interpretation and computer animation.

A second research thrust is to develop techniques for integrating planning and machine learning. Our work has developed new planning algorithms that can learn to solve very large problems that were beyond the scope of previous techniques. We are now extending that work to richer settings, for example, multi-agent planning, where agents must cooperate to complete a task.