Staff Page - Ugur Kuter

2006 Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, USA

2000 M. Sc. in Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

1998 B. Sc. in Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

Dr. Kuter is a SIFT research scientist specializing in Artificial Intelligence. His primary research activities focus on problems that are primarily on Automated Planning and Learning and related to Game Theory, Evolutionary Computation, Social Networks, and Semantic Web Service Composition. Dr. Kuter’s research also focuses on scenarios that involve uncertainty, nondeterminism, numeric and discrete components, multiple actors, and social behavior. 

Currently, he is part of the SIFT efforts on the DARPA ``Oh, By The Way'' program, developing formalisms and algorithms for plan-critic systems in highly dynamic mixed-initiative environments. Previously, he participated the University of Maryland's successful contributions to the DARPA's Integrated Learning and the Transfer Learning programs.

Dr. Kuter has more than 60 research publications; several of them are in the cross-disciplinary in the above topics that appeared in major AI conferences and journals on Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Web. Dr. Kuter's work on ``Social Trust based Web Service Composition'' won the Best Paper Award at ISWC-09, one of the predominant conferences on Semantic Web. His recent work on the RFF automated-planning system has received the ``Winner of the 2008 International Planning Competition -- Planning under Uncertainty, Full-Observable Planning Track'' award. Dr. Kuter has also been one of the collaborators on the open-source SHOP2 automated-planning system, an award-winner in the 2002 International Planning Competition. SHOP2 has been downloaded more than several thousand times, and has been used in hundreds of projects in industry, government, and academia. He continues to be one of the primary researchers and developers on SHOP2.

Prior to joining SIFT, Dr. Kuter was a Faculty Research Scientist at University of Maryland, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. He has advised several graduate students, including four PhD dissertations, two M.Sc. theses, and two independent studies.

Dr. Kuter has been a reviewer/program committee member for several international conferences and journals, including IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Artificial Intelligence Journal, and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He has been the co-chair/co-organizer of the following technical events:

* The AAAI-11 Student Abstracts and Posters Program.

* The AAAI-10 Student Abstracts and Posters Program.

* ``StrucK-09: The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Learning Structural Knowledge from Observations,’’ held at the 2009 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Pasadena, California.

* ``The ICAPS-07 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Learning,'' held at the 2007 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling in Providence, Rhode Island.