[Brown CS Talks] Brown CS Seminar: Bob Givan in the Lubrano on 6/14/02 at 11 am.

[talks-admin@list.cs.brown.edu]

                    The Department of Computer Science
			     BROWN UNIVERSITY

			      
			         presents

			        Bob Givan

			  Purdue University ECE

		      Friday, June 14, 2002 at 11 am
		      
		         Lubrano Conference Room
	      
	          Refreshments will be served at 10:45 am
		 

		    Large State-Space Stochastic Control
 

			         Abstract


    I will discuss and evaluate two quite different approaches to
finding
    good policies in stochastic control problems with extremely large
    state spaces.


    (1) I present two novel sampling techniques for deriving control
    policies, contrast these with two known techniques, and present
    results evaluating all four sampling approaches against three
    network-control problems.


    (2) I present a machine-learning method for logically specified
    control problems (e.g., probabilistic STRIPS problems).  This
approach
    leverages solutions to small problem instances (i.e., those with few
    domain objects) as training data to learn a policy that generalizes
    well to large problem instances.  Key to the method is a policy
    language bias based on a concept language over the domain definition
    predicates, similar to recent work by Martin & Geffner (KR-00). We 
    show results for familiar probabilistic STRIPS domains such as 
    logistics and enriched blocks-world problems.


    Speaker bio: Bob Givan received his BS degree in Mathematics and
    Biology from Stanford University in 1987, and his PhD degree in
    Computer Science from MIT in 1996. After a one-year postdoc at Brown
    University, he became Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer
    Engineering at Purdue University, in lovely West Lafayette, Indiana,
    where he continues to this day.




		       Host: Professor Tom Dean