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GMU C4I Center Seminar

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Course of Action Modeling with Probabilistic Ontologies

Henrique C. Marques

Friday, January 13, 2012 at 1:00 PM

Nguyen Engineering building, Room 4705

ABSTRACT

Planning during complex endeavors is a daunting task in many aspects -- a key one being the representation of shared intent, an open research topic that involves expressing a common picture among different planning systems with distinct languages, and sometimes disparate problem solving methodologies. The common approach is to use a translator between the order/request message and the planning system, which doesn't convey all the elements that are necessary to support the planning task. The present research proposes to address this issue by using a semantic layer as an interface among different planning systems. This not only improves interoperability, but also provides support for pruning the search space before the information is sent to the planning system. The layer is based on a probabilistic ontology, which provides shared intent description as well as formalization of the operational domain and of the planning problem, including a principled representation of the involved uncertainty. The proposed scheme supports previous analysis of the search space in order to send to the planning system a concise set of tasks that will contribute to reach the desired end state.

BIO

HENRIQUE C. MARQUES, a Lieutenant Colonel from Brazilian Air Force, is earning his Doctorate in Computer Science from Aeronautics Institute of Technology - ITA (Brazil). He is collaborating at the C4I Center as an Affiliate Instructor with Dr. Michael Hieb and Dr. Paulo Costa in a joint project between GMU and ITA. His research is in Automated Planning with a knowledge representation approach based in probabilistic ontologies. His academic background is in Distributed Simulation (MsC) and he has a specialization in System Analysis.