SPEAKER: VICTOR LESSER
Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Multi-Agent Systems Laboratory, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
ABSTRACT:
SPEAKER BIO:
Evolution of Hearsay-II (Blackboards) as an Architecture
for Interpretation Problems
The Hearsay-II speech understanding system was the first implementation
of a multi-level blackboard system. I will discuss extensions to this
basic blackboard architecture over the last twenty-five years that has
made it a more appropriate framework for constructing sophisticated
interpretation systems that operate in open environments. As part of this
discussion, I will describe a recently developed auditory scene analysis
system, IPUS, which exploits an integrated search at all levels of the
blackboard. Finally, I will touch on work that formalizes the
asynchronous, multi-level search process that is at the heart of the
blackboard architecture and provides a rigorous justification for many of
the search control heuristics developed over the years.
Victor Lesser received his A.B. in mathematics from Cornell University in
1966, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University
in 1969 and 1972, respectively. He was a research computer scientist at
Carnegie-Mellon University from 1972 to 1976 working under the direction
of Professor Raj Reddy. He joined the Computer Science faculty of
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts in 1977, and is
currently a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Multi-Agent
Systems Laboratory. His major research focus is on the control and
organization of complex AI systems. He is a founding fellow of the
American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and is considered a
leading researcher in the areas of blackboard systems (he was the system
architect for the Hearsay-II speech understanding system ), distributed
AI/multi-agent systems (he is considered one of the founders of the field
and was General Chairman of 1st International Conference on Multi-Agent
Systems), and real-time AI (he developed the concept of approximate
processing and its use in design-to-time scheduling). He has also made
contributions in the areas of multiprocessor architectures,
microprogramming, distributed operating systems, diagnostics, plan
recognition, computer supported collaborative work, auditory scene
analysis, and has recently been working on constructing agents for
information gathering on WWW.