Events Calendar

CS Colloquium

Speaker: Prof. Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Talk Title: Reflections on being an AI System Architect

Abstract: I will share with you the intellectual intuitions and serendipities that have shaped my research career. I first discuss my early research that includes my PhD thesis work at Stanford on a reconfigurable multiprocessor and my post-doc work as the system architect for the Hearsay-II system at CMU (the first fully instantiated blackboard system) that have strongly influenced my later research. These ideas will include distribution of control, meta-level and self-aware control, managing inconsistency rather than eliminating it, the importance of learning as an integral part of a system's architecture, and recognizing that experimentation is more than gathering statistics. In discussing these ideas, I will present a number of systems that I have developed with my students that embody these ideas. I will conclude the lecture by discussing some of my recent work on organizational control that brings many of these ideas together. The basis of this lecture comes out of two papers on my web site: ftp://mas.cs.umass.edu/pub/lesser/system_architect_webdoc.pdf and ftp://mas.cs.umass.edu/pub/LabHistory_Web-Article.pdf


Biography: Victor R. Lesser received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1966, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1973. He then was a post-doc/research scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, working on the Hearsay-II speech understanding system. He has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1977, and was named Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in 2009. His major research focus is on the control and organization of complex AI systems. He is considered a leading researcher in the areas of blackboard systems, multi-agent/ distributed AI, and real-time AI. He has also made contributions in the areas of computer architecture, signal understanding, diagnostics, plan recognition, and computer-supported cooperative work. He has worked in application areas such as sensor networks for vehicle tracking and weather monitoring, speech and sound understanding, information gathering on the internet, peer-to-peer information retrieval, intelligent user interfaces, distributed task allocation and scheduling, and virtual agent enterprises.

Professor Lesser is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and an IEEE Fellow. He was General Chair of the first international conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS) in 1995, and Founding President of the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) in 1998. To honor his contributions to the field of multi-agent systems, IFAAMAS established the "Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award." He received the UMass Amherst College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) Outstanding Teaching Award (2004) and Outstanding Research Award (2008), and the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity (2008). Professor Lesser was also the recipient of the IJCAI-09 Award for Research Excellence.


Host: Prof. Milind Tambe

Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 124

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal