Events Calendar

CS Colloq: Dr. Pradeep Varakantham

Talk Title: Risk sensitive planning and scheduling in uncertain environmentsSpeaker: Dr. Pradeep VarakanthamHost: Prof. Milind TambeAbstract: In risk sensitive reasoning, the key goal is to maximize expected utility of a user as opposed to maximizing an expected value. Such reasoning is imperative in domains like financial planning, rescue scenarios and project scheduling problems, where users are involved and there is uncertainty associated with decisions. In this talk, I will motivate, present algorithms and show experimental results for risk sensitive reasoning in two different settings:
(a) Planning in partially observable domains with non-deterministic outcomes to actions: In this research, we consider different risk attitudes of users, which are modeled as non-linear utility functions (mapping from current wealth to the utility) and provide efficient mechanisms to compute policies that account for such risk attitudes;and
(b) Scheduling in resource constrained project scheduling problems with durational uncertainty: Here, we develop a fitness function that is based on a risk parameter set by users to guide search for robust schedules.Bio:Dr. Pradeep Varakantham is an assistant professor at Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a post doctoral fellow with Steve Smith in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California under the guidance of Milind Tambe. His research interests include reasoning with uncertainty, multi agent systems, reinforcement/inverse learning and distributed constraint reasoning. He is co-author on a paper that was nominated for Jay Modi best student paper award at AAMAS 2009. He was the Outstanding Research Assistant in the Computer Science Department at University of Southern California for the year 2005. He has papers in some of the top Artificial Intelligence conferences including IJCAI, AAAI, AAMAS, and ICAPS.

Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 118

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: CS Front Desk