Associate Professor, Dynamics and Control
Mechanical Engineering Department (Dynamics & Control)
Oregon State University

Phone: (541) 737-9899
Fax: (541) 737-2600
E-mail: kagan.tumer@oregonstate.edu
URL: htp://engr.oregonstate.edu/~ktumer
Office: 426, Rogers Hall
Mailing address: Mechanical Engineering Department, 204 Rogers Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331-6001

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Recent News and Awards:

• Press Release on alleviating air traffic congesion with intelligent agents.

• Best Paper Award: K. Tumer and A. Agogino, ``Distributed Agent-Based Air Traffic Flow Management", the Sixth International Conference on Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2007) (out of 531 submissions to AAMAS).

• Recently completed workshop: Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALAg), at AAMAS 2007. Co-Chairs, Kagan Tumer, Sandip Sen and Liviu Panait. Honolulu, HI, May 2007.

Research Topics and Applications:

My main research interests are in designing control and optimization algorithms for large complex systems. Topics I investigate include:

• Learning and coordination in multiagent systems
• Optimization in large noisy systems
• Adaptive Control in complex systems
• Distributed reinforcement learning
• Evolutionary algorithms for control and optimization
• Multi classifier systems and clustering ensembles

Current and past applications of this work include:

• Controlling multiple robots and multiple unmanned aerial vehicles
• Optimizing micro sensor placement
• Managing congestion in airspace
• Coordinating a constellation of satellites
• Coordinating a large number of micro/nano devices
• Routing data/jobs over a network

For more detail, please see my research statement.

My edited book titled Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems which addresses many of these issues was published by Springer in 2004.

Journals and Book Series Editorship:

• Section editor of Advances in Complex Systems journal (World Scientific).
• Associate editor of the Pattern Recognition journal (Elsevier).
• Board of editors for the Complex systems and inter-disciplinary science book series by World Scientific.
• Guest editor of the Information Fusion Journal (Elsevier) for special issue on Applications of Ensemble Methods.

Conference Program Committees:

• The Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS) 2004-2008.
  • Senior Program Committee of AAMAS 06, AAMAS 08.
• The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) 2006-2007.
• The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2001-2007.
• The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2003, 2007.
• The Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering (ANNIE) 1999-2007.
• American Association for Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI Nectar Track) 2007.
• The International Workshop on Multi Classifier Systems (MCS) 2001-2005.
• The International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2006.

Workshop and Symposia Chairing:

• Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALAg), AAMAS 07. Co-Chairs, Kagan Tumer, Sandip Sen and Liviu Panait. Honolulu, HI, May 2007.
• Second Workshop on Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems. Co-chairs, Kagan Tumer, David Wolpert and Ilan Kroo. August, 2003, Stanford University, CA.
• First workshop on Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems. Co-chairs, Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert. August 6-9, 2002, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA.
• Special Session on Distributed Learning for Optimization. Co-chairs, Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert. Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2002. May 16, 2002, Honolulu, HI. (Also see, official CEC 2002 special session web page)
• AAAI Spring Symposium on Collaborative Learning Agents. Co-chairs, Peter Stone and Kagan Tumer. March 25-27, 2002, Stanford, CA. (Schedule).
• SFI Workshop on Distributed Intelligence - Mathematical Foundations of Collectives. Co-Chairs, Jim Crutchfield, Cosma Shalizi, Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert. January 22-26, 2002, Santa Fe, NM.
• Workshop on Turnkey Algorithms for Improving Generalizers. Co-chairs, Kagan Tumer and David Wolpert. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 1998, Breckenridge, CO.

Tutorials:

• Collective Intelligence tutorial at ANNIE 99.
• Classifier Ensembles tutorial at ANNIE 99 (with Chris Merz).