Chitta Baral

Research:

    Research Interests :

    Theories of actions and change for dynamic systems, robots, agents, and supply chains.

    (mobile robots; robot control - formal characterization and automatic generation ; cognitive robotics; reasoning about actions; concurrent actions; complex actions; actions with causal effects; actions with non-deterministic effects; narratives; sensing actions; actions with probabilistic effects; Bayes' nets; Markov decision processes; Partially observable Markov decision processes; Supply chain planning; etc.) 
     

    Non-monotonic reasoning, Knowledge representation, Logic Programming, Temporal reasoning, Combining knowledge bases, and AI in general.

    (mathematical foundations of nonmonotonic reasoning; use of defaults in commonsense knowledge; value minimization in circumscription; nested abnormality of logic programs, default theories and autoepistemic theories; well-founded semantics of default theories, logic programs, and autoepistemic theories; conditional logics; preferential models; abductive reasoning vs filtering; etc.) 
     

    Active, deductive and incomplete databases and workflows.

    (semantics of active databases; formulating correctness of active databases; specification of the purpose of active databases, and automatic derivation of active rules from the specification; modelling workflows as multiple co-operative agents; expanding queries to incomplete databases; Semantics of negation in deductive databases; etc.) 
     

    Multimedia and visualization.

    (modeling of multimedia data; object relation data model; multimedia database design using extended ER models; modeling the web as a databases; visualization and display of multimedia data; specification langauge for display of multimedia answers to a query; etc.)

Current and Recent Sponsered Projects

  • A systematic approach to reasoning about actions and change. NSF CAREER award. 1995-2001
  • Reasoning and planning with sensing actions and their applications. NSF. 4/1/00 -- 3/31/03.
  • Agent development and control verification using dual characterizations. NASA 01-02.

Honors, Awards, and Professional Service

  • Best paper award, ATAL (Agents, theories and languages) 99.
  • Research Initiation Award, National Science Foundation, 1992-1995
  • CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, 1995-2001
  • 3rd place finish in the AAAI 96 robot contest for office navigation.
  • 1st place finish in the AAAI 97 robot contest for home vacuuming.