"Adaptive Behavior and Learning in Groups of Interacting Autonomous Agents"

11/21/1997: [time not recorded]
[location not recorded]

Abstract: Our work has focused on developing methodologies for synthesizing and analyzing group behavior and learning in situated agents. The structured bottom-up behavior-based approach we have chosen is motivated by the desire to understand and harness the complex dynamics that result from simple local interactions between agents in distributed systems. The approach utilizes a biologically-inspired notion of basis behaviors as a substrate for control and learning, and removes the abstraction barrier between the individual and collective levels of interaction. This talk will overview the approach and focus on its role in enabling and facilitating learning in distributed systems. We will demonstrate how simple behaviors and communication mechanisms can be applied to effectively decrease locality and credit assignment problems in systems with multiple concurrent learning agents.

About Maja Mataric: Maja Mataric is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Neuroscience Program at the University of Southern California. She joined USC in September 1997, after two and a half years as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Volen Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University. She received a PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994. She has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, the Free University of Brussels AI Lab, LEGO Cambridge Research Labs, GTE Research Labs, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and ATR. Her Interaction Lab conducts research on the dynamics of interaction in complex adaptive systems including multi-agent systems ranging from a group of 26 mobile robots to economies and ecologies. Her work covers the areas of control and learning in intelligent situated agents, and cognitive neuroscience modeling of visuo-motor skill learning through imitation.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006