Special ECE/CSE Seminar: Subbarao Kambhampati

Challenges of Human-in-the-Loop Planning & Decision Support

 Subbarao Kambhampati

Arizona State University

October 21, 11am, ITEB 336

Abstract: Endowing  an automated agent with  the ability to “plan” — i.e., convert its high-level goals into an executable course of action — has been a long-standing quest in Artificial Intelligence.  For much of the history of automated planning, the dominant research theme has been efficient synthesis of plans under increasingly expressive system dynamics (classical, temporal, stochastic etc.).

An implicit assumption underlying  this research has been that the planner’s responsibilities start with taking a complete specification, and end with giving out a complete course of action. This assumption is no longer valid when humans are part of the decision making loop, as is the case in an increasing number of decision support and human-machine teaming scenarios. 

In this talk I will identify the research challenges in human-in-the-loop planning, including the need to interpret the goals/intentions of the humans in the loop, the need to support continual planning and replanning, the need to unobtrusively support team-decision making, and above all the need to do handle pervasive incompleteness in the domain models as well as problem specification.  I will then describe some of our ongoing work in handling these challenges in the context of human-robot teaming and crowd-sourced planning.

Short Bio: Dr. Subbarao Kambhampati is a professor of Computer Science at Arizona State University, where he leads the Yochan research group focusing on the challenges in  automated planning and decision support, as well as information integration from structured and unstructured data sources.  He is a 1994 NSF Young Investigator, a 2004 IBM faculty fellow and thrice received Google Research Awards. He was elected fellow of AAAI (in 2004) for his contributions to automated planning. He received the 2002 college of engineering teaching excellence award, 2011 university last lecture invitation, and 2012 departmental best teacher award. Kambhampati was the co-chair of AAAI 2005, and will be the program chair of IJCAI 2016. He is an elected Trustee of IJCAI, and the president-elect of AAAI.