Invited Speakers
Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Title: "Inference and Learning in Planning"
Short biography:
Hector Geffner got his Ph.D at UCLA in 1989 with a thesis that was co-winner of the 1990 ACM Dissertation Award. He then worked as Staff Research Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York and at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, in Caracas, Venezuela. He is currently a researcher at ICREA and a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. His research concerns the mathematical and computational issues that arise in the model-based approach to intelligent behavior, where agent controllers are derived
automatically from models of actions, sensors, and goals. Hector is a fellow of AAAI and ECCAI, and serves as Associate Editor of JAIR and EB member of Artificial Intelligence. He is author of the book
"Default Reasoning: Causal and Conditional Theories", MIT Press, 1992, and along with Rina Dechter and Joe Halpern, editor of "Heuristics, Probability and Causality: A Tribute to Judea Pearl", College Publications, 2010.
Richard Sutton, University of Alberta, Canada
Title: "Beyond Reward: The problem of knowledge and data"
Short biography:
Richard S. Sutton is a professor and iCORE chair in the
department of computing science at the University of Alberta. He
is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence and co-author of the textbook Reinforcement
Learning: An Introduction from MIT Press. Before joining the
University of Alberta in 2003, he worked in industry at AT&T and
GTE Labs, and in academia at the University of Massachusetts. He
received a PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts
in 1984 and a BA in psychology from Stanford University in 1978.
Rich's research interests center on the learning problems facing a
decision-maker interacting with its environment, which he sees as
central to artificial intelligence. He is also interested in
animal learning psychology, in connectionist networks, and generally in
systems that continually improve their representations and models of
the world.
Toby Walsh, University of New South Wales, Australia
Title: " Exploiting Constraints"
Short biography:
Toby Walsh is Reseach Group Leader at NICTA. He is adjunct Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, external Professor of the Department of Information Science at Uppsala University and an honorary fellow of the School of Informatics at Edinburgh University. He was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and of AI Communications. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Automated Reasoning and the Constraints journal. He has been elected a fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the European Coordinating Committee for AI in recognition of his research and service to the community. He has been Secretary of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP) and is Editor of CP News, the newsletter of the ACP. He is one of the Editors of the Handbook for Constraint Programming, and the Handbook for Satisfiability. He was Program Chair of the Constraint Programming Conference in 2001, Conference Chair of the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning in 2004, Program and Conference Chair of the Satisfiability Conference in 2005, and Conference Chair of the Constraint Programming Conference in 2008. Most recently he was Program Chair of the International Joint Conference on AI, IJCAI-2011.
