Soh receives NSF grant to expand automated decision-making research

Leen-Kiat Soh, Charles Bessey Professor in the School of Computing, has received a new grant from the National Science Foundation to expand his work on a previous artificial intelligence project focused on automating task planning for complex scenarios.

In collaboration with Adam Eck, a former University of Nebraska–Lincoln graduate student and currently an associate professor at Oberlin College, and researchers at the University of Georgia, Soh and his team will broaden their research efforts on a 2019 project that examined multi-agent, decentralized planning where agents jointly complete tasks. The team explored automating action sequences to maximize rewards in scenarios involving multiple tasks and agents, particularly in cases in which teamwork was required, but agents had limited or no communication with each other. 

“We were interested in how agents can carry out teamwork without any coordination,” Soh said. “In real-world situations that are more impromptu or ad-hoc, they might not have coordination or communication, and as a result, their actions, if not planned a priori, may not be optimal.”

In this second project, the team will add additional elements of uncertainty into the mix and explore how tasks and decision-making can still be optimized among groups of actors when key situational factors, others’ actions, and agents’ intentions are unclear and changing.