AAAI-98 Spring Symposium Series
on
Satisficing Models
March 23-25, 1998
Stanford University, California
To effectively accomplish their goals, agents need to model their
environment and other agents with which they interact. Building detailed,
accurate, and up-to-date models however is a time-consuming activity and
can detract from the actual problem solving activities of the agents. We
define "satisficing models" as approximate models that enable agents to
reliably perform at an acceptable level of effectiveness.
Agents have to make informed and reasoned decisions about allocating
their limited computing, sensing, and other resources toward problem
solving versus model building activities. On a related question, even
if an agent has a detailed model of the environment and other agents,
due to time and computational constraints, it may prefer to use only
abstractions of the model.
To be able to make these decisions effectively, agents must be able to
evaluate the accuracy and reliability of their current models, predict
the computational implications of building more accurate models, and
analyze which components of their world models will yield the maximum
incremental payoff upon enhancement. Research questions relevant to the
symposium include the following:
- What are the computational tradeoffs involved in model construction?
How can they be measured?
- How to incrementally develop and update the satisficing model with
changes in the environment and changes in the collection or behavior of
other agents?
- What is the role of inductive learning in resource-bounded
reasoning? Should learning be used to control deliberation? How should
one control the exploration-exploitation tradeoff?
- What are the existing methodologies for developing satisficing models?
What are their shortcomings? How can they be enhanced?
Submission information
The symposium will consist of individual presentations, invited talks,
break-out group discussions, panels, and video sessions. Participants
interested in presenting their work should send an extended abstract (12
point font, 5 pages or less) describing work in progress or completed work.
Other interested participants should send a one-page description of their
research interests with a short list of relevant publications. We would
like to encourage submissions for short position papers, video
presentations and for working systems that can be used for hands-on
demonstration during the symposium. We also welcome suggestions for panel
and break-out group discussions. We will accept only e-mail submissions of
postscript files. Submissions should be sent to
sandip@kolkata.mcs.utulsa.edu.
Submissions for the symposia are due by October 24, 1997. Notification of
acceptance/rejection will be e-mailed by November 14, 1997. Material to be
included in the working notes of the symposium must be received by January
17, 1998.
Organizing Committee
- Sandip Sen (Chair), University of Tulsa, sandip@kolkata.mcs.utulsa.edu
- Ed Durfee, University of Michigan, durfee@umich.edu
- Toru Ishida, Kyoto University, ishida@kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp
- Victor Lesser, UMass, lesser@cs.mass.edu
- Jeff Rosenschein, The Hebrew University, jeff@cs.huji.ac.il
- Tuomas Sandholm, Washington University, sandholm@cs.wustl.edu
- Milind Tambe, USC/ISI, tambe@isi.edu
- Shlomo Zilberstein, UMass, shlomo@cs.umass.edu