A Practical Application of Cooperative Multi-Agent Technology: The DCAS Severe Weather Radar Detection and Tracking System

Speaker: Victor Lesser

Affiliation: University of Massachusetts Amherst

Time: Wednesday 10/04/2013 from 12:00 to 13:00

Venue: Access Grid UWS. Presented from Parramatta (EB.1.32), accessible from Campbelltown (26.1.50) and Penrith (Y239).

Abstract: Over the last nine years, there has been a large, multi-university research effort, called CASA, centred at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, to develop a next-generation radar system for quickly detecting and tracking severe weather phenomena such as tornadoes. One of the results has been the development of a distributed adaptive radar system, called DCAS, which has been deployed in a 4-node test configuration in a region of the state of Oklahoma that has one of the highest incidences of tornadoes in the United States. The test system's performance has more than matched the original goals of the project.
The system architecture is highly distributed and scalable, which brings up a number of interesting agent issues involving coordination of radar scheduling, distributed meta-level control of radar configurations, and multi-step optimization. In his talk, I will first overview the basic architecture of the system, and then discuss my groups research on how these agent coordination and scheduling issues were solved in the system. This is joint work with Bo An, Sherief Abdallah, Yoonheui Kim, Mike Krainin, Chongjie Zhang together with Anita Raja and Shanjun Cheng from University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Biography:

Victor Lesser received the PhD degree in computer science from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1973. He is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His major research focus is on the control and organization of complex AI systems. He has pioneered work in the development of the blackboard architecture and its control structure, approximate processing for use in control and real-time AI, and a wide variety of techniques for the coordination of and negotiation among multiple agents. He was the system architect for first fully developed blackboard architecture (HEARSAY-II), when he was a research computer scientist at CMU from 1972 thru 1976, and is considered one of the founders of the Multi-Agent field starting with his early work in 1978. He has also made contributions in the areas of machine learning, signal understanding, diagnostics, plan recognition, and computer-supported cooperative work. He has worked in application areas such as sensor networks for vehicle tracking and weather monitoring, speech and sound understanding, information gathering on the internet, peer-to-peer information retrieval, intelligent user interfaces, distributed task allocation and scheduling, and virtual agent enterprises. In terms of statistics, he has published over 400 papers, graduated 34 PhD students, and based on Google Scholar his citation count is over 19,000, h-index is 69 and i10-index is 244.

Professor Lesser's research accomplishments have been recognized by many major awards over the years. He received the prestigious IJCAI-09 Award for Research Excellence. He is also a Founding Fellow of AAAI and an IEEE Fellow. He was General Chair of the first international conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS) in 1995, and Founding President of the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS). In 2007, to honour his contributions to the field of multi-agent systems, IFAAMAS established the "Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award." He also received a Special Recognition Award for his foundational research in generalized coordination technologies from the Information Processing Technology Office at DARPA.