Events Calendar

Distinguished Lecture

Speaker: Prof. Stuart Russell, University of California, Berkeley

Talk Title: Open universes and nuclear weapons

Abstract: I will discuss a formal unification of probability theory and full (open-universe) first-order logic that allows for uncertain reasoning about unknown objects and events within a general-purpose formal language. Applications range from citation information extraction to monitoring ompliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. The second half of the talk will describe the latter application in detail.

Biography: Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England in 1962. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco. In 1990, he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, and in 1995 he was cowinner of the Computers and Thought Award. He was a 1996 Miller Professor of the University of California and was appointed to a Chancellor's Professorship in 2000. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and in 2005 he received the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. He is a Fellow and former Executive Council member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He has published over 150 papers on a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and global seismic monitoring. His books include "The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction" (Pitman, 1989), "Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality" (with Eric Wefald, MIT Press, 1991), and "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig, Prentice Hall, 1995, 2003, 2010).


Host: Prof. Fei Sha, USC

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal