We welcome Whitney Clark, a Computer Science
undergrad, to our lab this summer. Whitney will be working on our robots,
doing programming for the Orca project, as well as doing other tasks around
the lab.
Summer fellowship:
Congratulations to Erik Albert for receiving a
summer graduate fellowship from the Graduate School!
UUST paper:
Erik, Elise, and Roy will have a paper in the 2007
International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible Technology (UUST
2007), one of the two primary conference venues for AUV (autonomous
underwater vehicle) research. Their paper, ``Appropriate Commitment
Planning for AUV Control,'' reports on basic AI research on automated
planning and acting (associated with the the Orca project)
as applied to AUV control.
Spring 2007
Elise wins teaching award:
Elise won the 2007 College of Liberal Arts
and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching and Advising. Way to
go!
Turner, E.H., Albert, E., Turner, R.M., and Latour, L. (2007).
Retaining majors through the introductory sequence, in Proceedings of
the 2007 ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE'07),
Covington, KY, March 7-10, 2007.
SIGCSE is the premier conference in computer science education.
New students in the lab:
We welcome two new students who will be in the
lab while working on their senior or honors thesis. Ben Pomelow is working
with Roy and Prof. Howard Patterson (Chemistry) on a computational
chemistry project having to do with determining the
effects of substituting impurities (e.g., Ag(CN)) in an ionic crystal
(e.g., NaCl). Mark Larsen is working with Roy on his biological
modeling project; he is beginning to extend the
nudibranch-hydroid predator-prey model to the ecosystem level to observe
effects of distributed local predation on overall succession and community
structure.
Roy presented an invited talk
(``Intelligent Mission Planning and Control of Autonomous Underwater
Vehicles'') at the 2005 International Conference on
Automated Planning & Scheduling (ICAPS) workshop on Planning Under
Uncertainty for Autonomous Systems, June, 2005, Monterey, CA. Erik also
attended the conference.
Welcome to Jeffrey Bush, who is working in our
laboratory during his COS 600 class.
Fall 2003: Student News.
Welcome to Jaimi Allen, a ``new''
M.S. student in our lab (she's been around a while, but is now officially a
grad student). We bid a fond farewell and wish good luck to Jon Bilodeau,
who heads off to Johns Hopkins for his Ph.D. this fall.
Summer 2003: Papers published.
Three papers were published from the
lab this summer at two conferences: ``Context-Sensitive Weights for a Neural
Network'' (Robert Arritt (Ph.D. student) & Prof. Roy Turner) was presented
at CONTEXT'03 by Robert
Arritt. Robert & Roy also had a paper (``Situation Assessment for
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using a priori Contextual Knowledge'') at the
Thirteenth International Symposium on Unmanned Untethered Submersible
Technology (UUST'03), which
Robert also presented. Roy and two other students, Erik Albert (Ph.D.
student) and Jon Bilodeau (undergraduate), had another paper in UUST'03,
``Interfacing the CoDA and CADCON Simulators: A Multi-Fidelity Simulation
Testbed for Autonomous Oceanographic Sampling Networks''. This was
presented by Erik Albert.
Summer 2003: MaineSAIL co-director is program co-chair for CONTEXT'03
Prof. Roy
Turner is one of the program co-chairs for
CONTEXT'03, the Fourth
International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context.
2002: MaineSAIL co-director on UMaine Research Honor Roll
Prof. Elise
Turner was among the top 25 researchers on campus in terms of overhead
research dollars brought into the University, according to a 2002 report.
Summer 2002: ECAI'02 workshop on context
Prof. Roy Turner co-organized, with
Patrick Brézillon of the University of Paris VI, a
tutorial on ``Models
and Use of Context in Artificial Intelligence'', which took place at the
2002 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Lyon, France).
Summer 2001: Student presents papers at CONTEXT'01
Robert Arritt (Ph.D. student)
presented two papers at CONTEXT'01, the Third International and
Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, in Dundee,
Scotland, in July, 2001. Robert kindly agreed to present these papers,
authored by Elise and Roy Turner, when they could not attend the conference.
Interagent communication project funded by Office of Naval Research
Prof. Elise Turner's project, ``Communication during Collaborative
Problem Solving in Autonomous Oceanographic Sampling Networks'', has been
funded by the Office of Naval Research for $365,000, with an additional
$194,286 in matching funds from UMaine. This project is related to the
CoDA Project.
Orca project gets new funding
The Orca Project, which
focuses on intelligent control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs),
recently received a $417,000 award from the Office of Naval Research for
continued work on intelligent mission control and context-sensitive
reasoning for single-agent and multiagent system control. Orca is directed
by Prof. Roy Turner.
) in an ionic crystal
(e.g., NaCl). Mark Larsen is working with Roy on his biological
modeling project; he is beginning to extend the
nudibranch-hydroid predator-prey model to the ecosystem level to observe
effects of distributed local predation on overall succession and community
structure.