Dr. Ugur Kuter Adds Two Papers to His List of Publications!

SIFT Researcher, Dr. Ugur Kuter, has recently published two new papers from the 6th International Explanation-Aware CompuTing (EXACT) Workshop.

M. Molineaux, U. Kuter, and M. Klenk. 2011. What Just Happened? Explaining the Past in Planning and Execution.

This paper describes a new formalism and new algorithms that enable a planner to proactively expand its knowledge of the environment during planning and execution.The plannner does this by modeling the exogenous events that can occur and forming explanations that reveal information about the world. We have implemented our new algorithms in a variant of the well-known SHOP2 planner that can replan when a failure occurs during plan execution. We have conducted an ablation study in two planning domains to examine the effects of explanation on execution. The results demonstrate that our algorithm successfully increases the performance of an agent using it in two planning domains.This improvement results from the agent having increased knowledge of the environment, which allows it to more accurately predict future events and ultimately make better plans.

M. Molineaux, D. Aha, and U. Kuter. 2011. Learning Event Models that Explain Anomalies.

This paper considers the problem of improving the goal- achievement performance of an agent acting in a partially observable, dynamic environment, which may or may not know all events that can happen in that en- vironment. Such an agent cannot reliably predict future events and observations. However, given event models for some of the events that occur, it can improve its predictions of future states by conducting an explanation process that reveals unobserved events and facts that were true at some time in the past.