Staff Page - Terry Zimmerman

2003 PhD, Computer Science & Engineering, Arizona State University

1982  MS, Nuclear Science & Engineering, Idaho State University

1977 BS, Engineering Science, Iowa State University

Dr. Zimmerman’s interests lie broadly in artificial intelligence and particularly in automated planning, scheduling and learning augmentations. He comes to SIFT from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where, first as a post-doctoral fellow and then as a project scientist, his work revolved around transportation and logistics problems and distributed problem-solving in domains featuring high levels of uncertainty.  At CMU Dr. Zimmerman was technical lead for the NSF-funded MKIDS program, which led to a novel scheduling methodology for maximizing reward in an environment where task quality varies with the time spent on it.  Most recently he was a principle researcher for the CMU team competing in the DARPA Coordinators program that developed distributed solutions for online, real-time scheduling to assist human teams in the field. 

Prior to earning his PhD, Dr. Zimmerman was a principle engineer and consultant to electric utilities for 15 years with NUS Corp, Scientech, and Halliburton.  His expertise included power plant risk and reliability analysis, the development of reliability-based methods for improving plant availability, and probabilistic risk assessment (PRA), He was the contracted technical director of the regulatory PRA for the 3-unit Palo Verde nuclear power plant.  Dr. Zimmerman was also lead engineer on major risk and reliability assessment studies for six power plants located in the U.S., Japan, and Korea.  During that time he helped develop the PSM and OPSTAT systems, some of the first software to automate and integrate energy plant risk assessment models into tools to provide quick visualization and real-time analysis of plant health to human operators.

A current interest of Dr. Zimmerman is extending multi-agent technology to client-side electric power management for the national smart grid initiative.

He has been on the review committees for AAAI, IJCAI, ICAPS, and FLAIRS conferences and reviews frequently for journals, including JAIR, the Journal of Scheduling, Computational Intelligence, and Constraint Programming.