News

Drs. Miller and Kuter give University Lecture

Drs. Miller and Kuter recently traveled to the University of Colorado at Boulder and delivered a seminar on October 7th titled "Supervising Automation: Hierarchical Delegation for “Unmanned” Systems We Can Live With" to the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV). We focused on presenting Playbook (R) research and integrative research on hierarchical network planning, learning and representations-- including some recent and innovative work on automation "self confidence" and its expression and use by human supervisors.

Drs. Kuter and Goldman co-author article to appear in Artificial Intelligence

Drs. Ugur Kuter and Robert Goldman are co-authors of the forthcoming article, "Plan Aggregation for Strong Cyclic Planning in Nondeterministic Domains," to appear in the prestigious journal, Artificial Intelligence (vol. 216, 2014). A prepublication draft is available on Dr. Goldman's homepage. The paper was written with researchers at the University of Maryland, Dr. Ron Alford, and Prof. Dana Nau, who have collaborated with SIFT on mulitple research projects (including, most recently, DARPA's OBTW program).

Dr. David McDonald co-author on journal paper in Advances in Cognitive Systems

Dr. David McDonald's workshop paper, co-authored with Prof. James Pustejovsky, "Representing Inferences and their Lexicalization" has appeared in the on-line journal Advances in Cognitive Systems.  This summarizes our work on our C3 project.

[Updated 3 September 2014]

Dr. David McDonald co-organizing the 8th International Natural Language Generation Conference

SIFT Researcher, Dr. David McDonald is one of the organizers of the 8th International Natural Language Generation Conference, being held June 19th to 21st 2014 in Philadelphia. This continues a series of international meetings in language generation going back to 1983, and this years will have participants from 12 different countries.

For more information: http://inlg2014.wordpress.com

SIFT presentations at NASA’s annual Human Research Program Investigator’s Workshop

Dr. Christopher Miller and Ms. Peggy Wu recently attended NASA’s annual Human Research Program Investigator’s Workshop in Houston. Generally, any NASA-sponsored human research program is required to present a briefing at this workshop, but it is unusual to present more than once per project. Nevertheless, SIFT’s AD ASTRA program was invited to present two lectures.

SIFT Joins NASA Human Health and Performance Center

SIFT is now a member of the NASA Human Health and Performance Center (NHHPC)! We are proud to be a part of this community and support NHHPC's goals to share information on best practices relating to advancing human health and performance innovations. Click here for more information on NHHPC.

Robert Goldman co-edits newly released Elsevier volume on plan recognition

Elsevier has recently published Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition, a collection of articles edited by Staff Scientist Robert P. Goldman, together with Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida), Chris Geib (Drexel University), Hung Bui (Nuance), and David Pynadath (Institute for Creative Technologies, University of Southern California).

SIFT have moved our Minneapolis office

SIFT have moved our Minneapolis office as of March 1st, 2014.  Our new office address is:

Smart Information Flow Technologies
319 1st Ave North
Suite 400
Minneapolis, MN 55401-1689

See our Contact / Vist SIFT page for more details.

Journal Article on Loop Acceleration and Plan Generation

An article by SIFT researchers Robert Goldman, Michael Pelican, and David Musliner has appeared in the International Journal of Software Tools for Technology Transfer, Volume 16, Issue 1, pages 13-29, 2014.
Titled "A loop acceleration technique to speed up verification of automatically generated plans", this paper describes a method for dramatically improving the speed at which the CIRCA automated controller synthesis and verification system can create guaranteed-safe plans.

Dan Thomsen authors two chapters in "Handbook of Human Computation"

SIFT Principal Researcher Dan Thomsen has two chapters in the new Handbook of Human Computation, edited by Pietro Michelucci and published by Springer in December 2013.

The first chapter "Solving Wicked Problems" discusses using crowds to solve problems so challenging people cannot even tell if a problem is solved. The second chapter "Applying Security Lessons Learned to Human Computation Solving Systems" tries to ensure this emerging field doesn't fall into the same old security pitfalls.

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