Alan Fern's Personal WWW Page

Alan Fern

Assistant Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Oregon State University

Office Location: 2071 Kelley Engineering Center
(541) 737-9202 (office)
(541) 737-1300 (fax)
E-mail: afern@eecs.orst.edu
Postal Address: Kelley Engineering Center, Corvallis, OR 97330-5501, U.S.A.

Quick Links: Teaching Research Publications Students Resources

Learning Track of 2008 International Planning Competition

I am co-organizing the first learning track for the 2008 6th International Planning Competition that is held in conjunctions with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. See the competition web-site for details.

Education

B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Maine, 1997

M.S. Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 2000

Ph.D. Computer Engineering, Purdue University, 2004 (advised by Robert Givan)

Teaching

CS 532: Advanced Artificial Intelligence (Winter '08)
CS 515: Algorithms and Data Structures (Fall '07)
CS 534: Machine Learning (Spring '07)
CS 533: Intelligent Agents and Decision Making (Winter '07)
CS 321: Theory of Computation (Fall '06)

Research

My primary research interests are in the field of artificial intelligence, where I focus on the sub-areas of machine learning and automated planning. I am particularly interested in the intersection of these two areas where we develop algorithms that learn to plan more effectively based on past experiences.

A sample of some of my current and recent research projects include:

The OSU Digital Scout Project
Using AI techniques for proactive network security
Automated planning and machine learning in real-time strategy games
Developing Intelligent Virtual Assistants (see this paper for example)
Machine learning for speeding-up AI planning and search systems
Machine Learning for querry-by-humming

Also see my Publications

Current Students

Radha-Krishna Balla, MS, Research: Monte-Carlo planning for tactical battles in RTS games
Scott Dejmal, PhD, Research: proactive security in Peer-to-Peer networks
Robin Hess, PhD, Research: computer vision for interpreting American football video
Kshitij Judah, PhD, Research: user-initiated machine learning & learning for UCT
Jervis Pinto, PhD, Research: interpreting multi-object trajectory data
Paul Wilkins, PhD, Research: web-cam interface to tactile images for the visually impaired
Yuehua Xu, PhD, Research: machine learning for AI planning and search

Former Students

Sean McDougal, MS 2008, Project: "Automatic Panorama Stitching"
Benjamin Brewster, MS 2007, Project: "Finding and Using Chokepoints in Stratagus"
Christopher Ventura, MS 2007, Thesis: "A SAT-Based Planning Framework for Optimizing Resource Production"
Sungwook Yoon, PhD 2006 (co-advised with Robert Givan), Thesis: "Learning Control Knowledge for AI Planning Domains"
Daman Oberoi, MS 2006, Project: "Simulation-Based Optimization of Football Defenses"
Hema Jyothi, MS 2006 (co-advised with Thinh Nguyen), Project: "Reinforcement Learning for Network Routing"