Andrew Haas Ph.D., University of Rochester Associate Professor haas@cs.albany.edu (Personal Page) Computer Science Department University at Albany Albany, NY 12222 (518) 442-9066 (518) 442-5638 (FAX)

Personal Statement of Research

My research interests are in several branches of artificial intelligence, including syntax, semantics and parsing of natural language, knowledge representation (especially the representation of the notions of belief and knowledge), and planning. My current work is on the following topics: Most planning programs build plans for re-arranging the physical world. In everyday life, people often plan to acquire infomation: to find out what time it is, to find out the combination of the safe, to find a copy of certain book. I have built a simulated robot that can acquire information from a user (using both English words and pointing), and also can plan to acquire information through perception. For example, if told "Find a copy of "War and Peace", it will go from room to room in a building, looking at books until it finds one titled "War and Peace". The robot uses reactive planning: instead of planning far in advance, it repeatedly decides what to do next, does it, looks at the result, and makes another decision. I have designed an epistemic logic based on a sentential theory of propositional attitudes. Philosophical work on sentential theories has made it clear that they give us new a way to analyze quantification into the scope of attitudes: by defining a class, or perhaps several classes, of distinguished names in an agent's representation language. For example, we analyze "John knows what Mary's phone number is" as meaning that John knows the sentence phone(mary)=T, where T is a list of arabic numerals -- not just an arbitrary term that denotes Mary's phone number. The new logic is the first one that allows us to state such ideas. I have proved the soundness and completeness of a resolution theorem proving algorithm for this logic, based on translating the logic into ordinary first-order logic.

Selected Publications

"A Parsing Algorithm for Unification Grammar," Computational Linguistics, forthcoming.

"A Syntactic Theory of Belief and Action." Artificial Intelligence Journal, May 1986.

"Possible Events, Actual Events, and Robots." Computational Intelligence, May 1985.