SASEMAS Workshop Programme

Monday, 8th May, 2006.

Workshop Proceedings.

Keynote Abstract and Invited Speaker Bio

Title: "Star Trek's 'Picard Maneuver' and Asimov's 'Runaround': Lessons for SASEMAS 2006"
Milind Tambe*, USC

This talk focuses on both security and safety in multiagent systems, using science fiction for inspiration. The first half of the talk focuses on security in multiagent systems, i.e. the ability of the system to deal with intentional threats from adversaries. Inspired by Star Trek's "Picard Maneuver", our key idea is to undermine an adversary's capability to track an agent (or agent team's) actions. To that end, an agent generates randomized plans, while maintaining quality guarantees. Our key contribution is to provide efficient procedures for generating such randomized policies for single-agent and decentralize (PO)MDPs, while guaranteeing a threshold reward.

The second half of the talk focuses on safety. We begin with the March 1942 issue of "Astounding Science Fiction", where in the story "Runaround", Isaac Asimov for the first time enumerated his three laws of robotics. Decades later, researchers in agents and multiagent systems have begun to examine these laws for providing a useful set of safety guarantees on deployed agent systems. However, operationalizing these laws in the context of such mixed agent-human teams raises three novel issues. First, while the laws were originally written for interaction of an individual robot and an individual human, clearly, our systems must operate in a team context. Second, key notions in these laws (e.g. causing "harm" to humans) are specified in very abstract terms and must be specified in concrete terms in implemented systems. Third, since removed from science-fiction, agents or humans may not have perfect information about the world, they must act based on these laws despite uncertainty of information. The talk focuses on addressing this uncertainty and illustrates that agents must detect and overcome such states of uncertainty while ensuring adherence to Asimov's laws. We illustrate preliminary results of two different domains that each have different approaches to operationalizing Asimov's laws.

* Joint work with Emma Bowring, Barbara Grosz, Sarit Kraus, Fernando Ordonez, Praveen Paruchuri, Nathan Schurr, Pradeep Varakantham

Milind Tambe is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California(USC). He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He leads the TEAMCORE research group at USC (http://teamcore.usc.edu), with research interests in multi-agent systems, specifically multi-agent teamwork, adjustable autonomy and distributed negotiations. His research on these topics has led to some of the most highly cited papers in the field, as well as the ACM SIGART Agents Research award (2005), the Okawa foundation research grant award (2003), SASEMAS best paper award (2005), AAMAS best paper award (2002), the RoboCup Scientific Challenge Award for oustanding research (1999), as well as selection among the "best of" papers of CEEMAS (2005), AAMAS (2003), Agents (1999) and ICMAS (1998) conferences. He was general co-chair for the International Joint Conference on Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2004, and program co-chair of the International conf on multi-agent systems (ICMAS) 2000. He has been associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS). A current member of the board of directors of the International foundation for multiagent systems, he has also served on the board of trustees of RoboCup, the Robot World Cup Federation.