Room TRS2164, 575 Bay Street (entrance at 55 Dundas Street West), Ryerson University

Monday January 23, 2017 at 12:00 p.m. Bita Banihashemi, PhD Candidate in Computer Science at York University, will be presenting “Abstraction in Situation Calculus Action Theories”. Speaker: Bita Banihashemi PhD Candidate, Computer Science York University Day & Time: Monday, January 23, 2017 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. Location: Room TRS2164, 575 Bay Street (entrance at 55 Dundas Street West), Ryerson University Contact: Maryam Davoudpour Organizer: WIE, Magnetics, Measurement/Instrumentation-Robotics Abstract: We develop a general framework for agent abstraction based on the situation calculus and the ConGolog agent programming language. We assume that we have a high-level specification and a low-level specification of the agent, both represented as basic action theories. A refinement mapping specifies how each high-level action is implemented by a low-level ConGolog program and how each high-level fluent can be translated into a low-level formula. We define a notion of sound abstraction between such action theories in terms of the existence of a suitable bisimulation between their respective models. Sound abstractions have many useful properties that ensure that we can reason about the agent’s actions (e.g., executability, projection, and planning) at the abstract level, and refine and concretely execute them at the low level. We also characterize the notion of complete abstraction where all actions (including exogenous ones) that the high level thinks can happen can in fact occur at the low level. Biography: Bita Banihashemi is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at York University. Her research is primarily focused on agent supervision, which is a form of control/customization of an agent’s behavior. Her research interests include Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, and AI and the Web.