Hello everyone,
Please note this important seminar. Stuart Russell is a world-renowned
researcher in Artificial Intelligence, and author of the leading textbook
on the topic.
Everyone is encouraged to attend!
Monday June 30th, 2008
McConnell Engineering Rm 12
2:00pm
Hierarchical learning and decision making
Stuart Russell
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley
Effective behaviour in complex environments requires some form of
hierarchical structure. The first part of the talk covers hierarchical
reinforcement learning, wherein guidance as to the correct
hierarchical structure can be supplied to an agent in the form of a
*partial program* in which choices may be left unspecified. The ALisp
language - an partial programming extension of Lisp - includes
reinforcement learning algorithms that converge to the optimal
complete program consistent with the given partial program. ALisp
includes constructs for specifying asynchronous concurrent activities.
ALisp shows promise as a tool for scaling up reinforcement learning.
The second part of the talk covers lookahead decision making with
hierarchical constraints on behavior. Here the setting is classical
hierarchical planning. We resolve a longstanding open problem by
defining *angelic* semantics for high-level actions and providing the
first algorithms capable of proving that a high-level plan is correct
and optimal without considering its concrete implementations. We also
consider online hierarchical search with bounded lookahead.
[Joint work with Ron Parr, David Andre, Bhaskara Marthi,
Andy Zimdars, David Latham, Carlos Guestrin, Jason Wolfe]
Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with
first-class honours in Physics from Wadham College, 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, Berkeley, where he is
currently Professor and Chair of Computer Science. In 2003 he was inducted
as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Stuart Russell is
an author of the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
(together with Peter Norvig).