Speaker: Dr. Ubbo Visser Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Germany When: Friday, Nov 2nd, 2007 Time: 2:00pm Where: ECS 243 (HPDRC Conf. Room)

Abstract:

Autonomous mobile agents with the capacity to perform specific tasks such as monitoring security areas or assist in rescue scenarios have become increasingly important. Preparing one agent to have these abilities involves a variety of research questions. How does the agent know where it is? How does the agent get from A to B? What kind of action does the agent choose if an unforeseen situation arises? What is the best locomotion algorithm? Can the agent predict situations and, in general how can we measure the performance of these agents? This talk comprises a summary of a number of research projects that we have carried out at the University of Bremen. We will present problems, research approaches and solutions tackling localization, navigation, decision-making, as well as situation recognition and prediction. We then discuss how these results are relevant to other domains, and how they can be used and generalized in other domains such as the traffic domain or the medical domain.

Biography:
Ubbo Visser is a Privat-Dozent (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, Germany since 1999. He received his Habilitation in Computer Science (qualification for Professor) from University of Bremen in 2003, a PhD in Geoinformatics from University of Muenster in 1995, and a MSc in Geography (Landscape-ecology) from University of Muenster in 1988. His research specialization is in artificial intelligence, more specifically on knowledge representation and reasoning. He is interested in the combination of symbolic and sub-symbolic technologies in the domain areas of "Semantic Web" and "Multiagent Systems". Dr. Visser has published over 75 scientific articles and has received public research funding at international (Australia, European Commission), national (Germany), and regional (Bremen State) levels -- including DFG (German Research Council), BMBF (Federal Ministry for Education and Research), ARC (Australian Research Council), and also from Industry. He has chaired a variety of international conferences, workshops, tutorials and symposia (e.g. RoboCup, IJCAI- and ECAI-Workshops) and he has won multiple prizes and awards for outstanding research papers and software engineering (e.g. best artificial intelligence application in Germany, awarded by the German AI society). He is the Co-Founder of three software companies that develop products based on modern AI-technologies (Conterra Ltd., ProPlant Ltd., Coach and Win Ltd.). He is the Co-Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence and member of the editorial board of the International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems.