Groups

• CogRob: The Cognitive Robotics Group (regular invited talks and internal presentations)
  The Cognitive Robotics Group is concerned with endowing robotic or software agents with higher level cognitive functions that involve reasoning, for example, about goals, perception, actions, the mental states of other agents, collaborative task execution, etc. To do this, it is necessary to describe, in a language suitable for automated reasoning, enough of the properties of the robot, its abilities, and its environment, to permit it to make high-level decisions about how to act. The group has developed effective methods for representing and reasoning about the prerequisites and effects of actions, perception and other knowledge-producing actions, and natural events and actions by other agents. These methods have been incorporated into a logic programming language for agents called GOLOG (alGOl in LOGic). A prototype implementation of the language has been developed. Experiments have been conducted in using the language to build a high-level robot controller, some software agent applications (e.g. meeting scheduling), and more recently business process modeling tools.

• COGS: Craig's Graduate Students

• SheRead: Sheila's Reading Group
  Sheila's reading group meets for various purposes but mainly to discuss papers that are of common interest to the group and for Sheila's students to present the research they are currently pursuing. While research that is ready for publication is generally presented in practice talks in CogRob, in SheRead we also discuss less mature research endeavors aiming to elicit feedback and trigger discussion about the merits and limitations of our current effords. When meeting to discuss papers, the selection of the later is done democratically but guided by our current research interests. That said, the overall objective in the selection is rather to broaden our perspective than to deepen our knowledge about a particular sub-area of knowledge representation. Everybody who is interested and willing to participate is welcome at our meetings.