AI: Artificial Intelligence Research at the USC Information
Sciences Institute
For further information about any project described on this page, contact Eric Mankin (310)448-9112
Dedicated
to research and education in computer science and information technology,
the University
of Southern California's Information
Sciences Institute is home to one of the world's largest research groups
in artificial intelligence. It is particularly well known for its
work in the areas of intelligent agents, knowledge representation, and
natural language processing.
ISI researchers have played a key role in the development of Soar, the leading cognitive agent architecture in use today. Current research focuses on intelligent agent adaptation and behavior in strenuous real-time domains, such as among teams of autonomous helicopter pilots under fire in a battlefield simulation.
Recent work include intelligent animated "GuidebotTM" virtual
tutors for interactive simulated learning environments. Researchers are now modeling
emotional motivations
in autonomous agents and team behaviors such as negotiation and cooperation.
The are also developing softbot agents and intelligent proxies with variable
levels of autonomy and multiagent
team coordination for specific office
(Electric Elves project) and field applications, as well as creating
mathematical models of such multiagent systems.
ISI's Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) is a leading developer of interactive technologies for education, particularly in the areas of distance education, pedagogical agents such as the Steve and Adele Guidebots, and intelligent assistants. These technologies have been applied to specialized training applications such as team operation of a ship's engine room controls, medical diagnostic reasoning, factory operation, and undergraduate chemistry. They are also being extended to simultaneous training of student teams in a common virtual setting. In conjunction with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, and the USC Intergrated Media Systems Center (IMSC), ISI is developing an elaborate interactive virtual reality training exercise using artifical intelligence-animated agents. For the U.S. Armed forces, CARTE has created the Tactical Lanaguage Project, a videograme system using AI-animated characters to teach soldiers Arabic quickly.
Robotics researchers at ISI develop modular hardware systems and teams of independently-controlled autonomous agents that work in synergy. The DreamTeam, a set of autonomous soccer-playing robots programmed with different roles, won the international RoboCup competition in 1997 and is being programmed for more sophisticated visualization capabilities and team interactions.
CONRO (Configurable Robots) is a miniature reconfigurable modular robotic system for reconnaissance and search and rescue tasks in urban, seashore and other field environments. Each robotic module is programmable to function independently but communicate with the others attached to it for joint tasks without a central controller.
Contour Crafting, a novel system for building structures automatically, using materials-extruding nozzles guided by a large-scale Rapid Prototyping system hopes to build its first house in 2005.
Next-generation planning and reasoning architectures such as EXPECT and SIMS/Ariadne are being used to build planning applications with self-critiquing capabilities, knowledge-based (expert) systems that lay users can expand and update easily, and intelligent information agents that gather information and perform queries among heterogeneous collections of databases and websites. One recent application is an intelligent "virtual travel agent" for the web.
Digital Government
The Digital Government Research Center (DGRC), which ISI administers jointly with Columbia University, is using ISI's SIMS/Ariadne reasoning architectures and other tools such as advanced data mining with meta-patterns techniques to build a web-based system for integrating legacy data sets from a variety of federal agencies.
Natural
language processing research at ISI combines new statistical techniques
and traditional symbolic methods to produce practical tools for translation,
summarization, and text and speech generation. ISI researchers have also
developed ONTOSAURUS,
a large-scale ontology (concept thesaurus) for machine interpretation of
texts. Recent
projects include a Japanese-English translator, a
speech generator that learns to sound out ancient texts in dead languages
for aural interpretation, and a
toolkit for rapid construction of a translator between any two languages
from a set of bilingual texts. Current work includes machine interpretation
and summarization of concepts in texts, and new tools for multilingual
web access.
About ISI
The Information Sciences Institute was established in 1972 as
an
independent research unit of the University of Southern California
School of
Engineering. Over the years, ISI has emerged as one of the world's
leading
computer science and information technology research centers
and a major
contributor to the growth of the technology-driven economy. ISI
introduced
the Internet Domain Name System and built one of the first successful
e-commerce systems. Our hardware and software prototypes have
been
incorporated into thousands of commercial and public systems.
Our staff of 325 includes internationally recognized researchers
and USC
faculty in fields ranging from network communications and artificial
intelligence to high-performance parallel computing and integrated
circuit
design. ISI provides high-level services and resources to the
international
computing community and enables students and researchers to work
with some
of the most advanced systems, testbeds, and design tools in the
world. ISI
is bicoastal, with locations in Marina del Rey, California, and
Arlington,
Virginia.