Artificial Intelligence at UMaine
Artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the area of computer science that focuses on getting computers to do truly difficult things, either those things that are hard for computers (e.g., vision, understanding natural language) or those that require human-like intelligence (e.g., planing, medical diagnosis).
AI research at UMaine. The Computer Science Department's AI laboratory is MaineSAIL, the Maine Software Agents and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. As the name suggests, MaineSAIL takes and agent-based approach to AI, dealing with hardware/software systems that perceive their environment, make decisions about how to behave, and take action. Many of MaineSAIL's projects have as their domain the intelligent control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) or multi-AUV systems, such as autonomous oceanographic sampling networks (AOSNs). A wide variety of research projects have been or are the focus of effort at MaineSAIL. These include projects focusing on:
- adaptive automated planning (Orca)
- context-sensitive reasoning
- organization and reorganization of multi-AUV systems (CoDA)
- task assignment via constraint-based reasoning for multi-AUV systems (CoDA)
- unexploded ordnance detection and mine elimination by robots
- interagent communication
- dealing with multiagent systems in which some agents misbehave ("miscreants")
- computational ecology
- computational chemistry
- computer science education in K-12 and college
- literate programming in Lisp
MaineSAIL consists of its director, Roy Turner, PhD students, masters students, and undergraduates. MaineSAIL has received over $1.75 million in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, and is currently a participant in the Maine Center for Autonomous Marine Survey (MCAMS), an interdisciplinary effort by researchers in marine science, AUV development, and computer science that was recently funded by the Maine Technology Institute (for approximately $1.3 million).