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1998 American Association for Artificial Intelligence Fall Symposium

Planning with Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

Any deployed planning system must be designed to face the fact that the real world is infused with uncertainty. Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are an elegant way of modeling uncertainty in sensing and acting, and can be used as the foundation for robust plan generation and execution. Of course, such expressiveness and mathematical elegance comes with a price: only the simplest of planning problems can be easily described and solved exactly as POMDPs. However, the last five to ten years have seen advances in our understanding of POMDP algorithms and heuristics, improvements in the overall speed of computing, and increases in the demand for computer support for decision making under uncertainty. Now is the perfect time to assess the POMDP approach in light of these changes, to figure out where we stand, and to plot a course for continued research and development. The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers who have worked in any of several key focus areas in the study of POMDPs: Researchers will present their work in short, highly interactive, presentations, to allow all participants to form their own conception of the state of the art and the most promising directions for future research. Organizing Committee: Michael Littman (co-chair), Duke University, mlittman@cs.duke.edu; Tony Cassandra (co-chair), MCC, cassandra@mcc.com; Steve Hanks, U. Washington, hanks@cs.washington.edu; Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Brown University, lpk@cs.brown.edu.

Schedule

Friday, October 23

Saturday, October 24

Sunday, October 25


Michael L. Littman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0129
Office: D209 LSRC
Phone: 919-660-6537
Fax: 919-660-6519
mlittman@cs.duke.edu



Last modified: Fri Jul 31 09:18:17 EDT 1998