computer sciences lab & nicta opportunities for honours projects 2007 sylvie thiebaux

Computer Sciences Lab & NICTAOpportunities for Honours projects 2007

Sylvie Thiebaux

College of Engineering & Computer Science (& Friends)

DCS

DEng

CSL

InfoEng

NICTA

Research Groups

• Research focuses on:– Artificial Intelligence– Logic & Automated Reasoning– Computer Vision

• 40 researchers in 4 groups:– Diagnosis, Planning, & Optimisation (DPO, aka KRR)– Statistical Machine Learning (SML)– Logic & Computation (LC)– Vision Science, Technology & Applications (VISTA)

Diagnosis, Planning & Optimisation Group

• Diagnosis– Explain abnormal situations from observations– Circuits, power networks, web services, humans

• Planning– Decide & schedule the tasks to be undertaken

to meet given objectives

– Project planning, military operations planning, robot control, solving puzzles & games

• Optimisation– Find the best possible solution to a problem– How can we predict the hardness of optimisation problems?

Contact: [email protected]

Planning with time, resources, and uncertainty

• Uncertainty about task duration and resource consumption

– Model uncertainty– Handle continuous time/res.– Design efficient algorithms– Build robust plans– Build better GUIs

• Build a better Microsoft Project!Contact: [email protected]

Model-Based Supervision of Composite Systems

Composite systems: feature simple components organised into ahighly reconfigurable architecture

Examples: web & grid services, power and water systemstelecom networks, traffic control systems

Supervision tools: confer the ability to– self-diagnose to detect faults in

the system and explain their causes

– self-reconfigure to restore or improve service

Project goals: develop theories, algorithms & tools for the supervision of composite systemsApproach: draws on artificial intelligence(model-based diagnosis, planning), discrete-event systems, and model-checking


Statistical Machine Learning Group

• Machine Learning automates the input-output mapping.

• Lots of fun projects for analysing data.Let us do both theory and application

input(data)DocumentsVideoMoleculesMicroarraysSensor NetworksMission Plans

output(analysis)Authors, scriptPeople, scenesBiological functionCancer diagnosisNovelty, alarmOptimal strategy

Magic happens …


Bioniformatics

• Build feature selector for genes• Integrate sequencing information (similarity ..)• Integrate automatic analysis of abstract

+ =

Cancer diagnosis


Document Analysis

abc$

b

c$c$abc$ abc$

+.

• Build document similarity measure• Build fast discriminative optimiser (SVM style)• Integrate into mail filtering system (e.g. DSPAM)

= Spam filter

Suffix tree


Logic and Computation Group

• Logical analysis of systems– Assure correctness, safety, robustness– Software systems (are votes counted okay?)

– Physical systems (will the robot arm break?)

– Systems of agents (can I trust this eBay seller?)

• Tools for reasoning by computers– Logical deduction: “Does it follow?”– Constraint satisfaction: “How might it be?”

• Theory behind all this– New kinds of logic for new tasks


Constraint Satisfaction Platform (G12)

• Constraint Satisfaction Problem– “Hard” constraints - e.g. every

team plays every other at home and away

– “Soft” constraints - e.g. fairness conditions (may be complex)

– Additional requirements from TV stations, etc. complicate further

• Difficult computational problem Contact:

[email protected]

L4 Verified

L4 Micro-kernel

L4 operating system used in embedded systems

e.g. sensor networks, mobile phones

“Small” trusted kernel (guarantees separation properties)

NICTA project: formally verify the kernel

Project runs until 2008

One of the most ambitious formal verification projects ever undertaken anywhere

Commercial potential if successful


Vision Science, Tech. & Applications Group

• Major projects:– Spectral imaging– Smart cars– Medical image analysis– Surveillance


Smart Cars

Pedestrian detection & tracking

Speed sign detection & recognition

Car detection & tracking

A complete driver assistance system, focusing on driver safety


Automatic Anatomical Structure Extraction

Topology repair Parametrisation

Detection of Alzeihmer’s disease

- changes to hyppocampus implicated- doctors hand-trace each scan slice- obtain a math. representation for analysis- need to repair and parametrise the 3D data


Finally …

• These slides are at: http://rsise.anu.edu.au/~thiebaux/HP.ppt

• Many other projects, for exmple in:• Traffic control [email protected], [email protected]

• Game playing [email protected], [email protected]

• Sensor networks [email protected]

• Agent architectures [email protected]

• Artificial AI, Trust [email protected]

• Automated deduction [email protected], [email protected]

• Satisfiability [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

• If you like theory [email protected]

• Apply for a summer scholarship with us!