Transcript Intelligent Settlement of Constraints

Research Information Session
Associate Professor John Thornton
Gold Coast BIT Honours Degree Convenor
[email protected]
About the Honours Degree
Must have GPA of 5.0 (credit) or better for
2nd and 3rd year of Bachelor degree
 One year full-time – 80CP made up of:
 40CP Dissertation
 10CP Research Methods in IT + 30CP electives
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Up to one 3rd year course
Rest must be honours level
Supervisor may run a special subject
Graded 1st, 2.1, 2.2 or 3rd class
John Thornton
Choosing a Research Topic
Honours is about research training
 Find a topic that interests you
 Find a supervisor you can work with
 Consider your future after honours
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Entry into a more interesting job?
Research Higher Degree, e.g. PhD?
Career as an academic?
Your choice of topic and supervisor sets
the direction of your future life – consider
carefully – getting 1st class also matters
John Thornton
Financial Support
University values its research students
 Your work and publications raise the
university’s profile
 Various School Scholarships:
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Summer Project $2,000
Honours Scholarship $2,000
Other sources:
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IIIS, NICTA, Supervisor Funds
Tutoring opportunities
John Thornton
How To Apply
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Closing Date for applications 31st October
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For details of how to apply, see:
http://www.griffith.edu.au//ua/aa/sta/admission/honours/
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For details of the degree structure, see:
http://www17.griffith.edu.au/cis/p_cat/admission.asp?ProgCode=2020&type=overview
John Thornton
Research with Dr John
Gold Coast Honours Convenor
 Associate Director IIIS for Gold Coast
 RHD Coordinator IIIS and ICT Gold Coast
 NICTA researcher
 Leader of Constraint Satisfaction and
Hierarchical Temporal Memory research
groups
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8 PhD completions
1 MPhil, 2 Masters, 5 Honours completions
John Thornton
What are Constraints?
A constraint is a relationship over
object(s) in the world.
What is allowed?
What is not allowed?
Knowledge about broad range of
real world domains can be easily
expressed in terms of constraints
John Thornton
Constraint Programming
“Constraint programming
represents one of the closest
approaches computer science has
yet made to the Holy Grail of
programming: the user states the
problem, the computer solves it.”
Eugene Freuder, Constraints, April, 1997.
John Thornton
Constraint Satisfaction
Given:
 A set of variables
 A set of permitted values for each variable
 A set of constraints on subsets of variables
Find: an assignment of values to variables such
that all the constraints are satisfied.
John Thornton
Example: Graph Colouring
Variables: geometric regions (e.g., all states in India)
 Domain: available colours
 Constraints: neighbours cannot have the same colour
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John Thornton
General Techniques
Problems are often NP-complete
 Over-constrained
 Two classes of technique:
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Backtracking
Local search
John Thornton
Eight Queen Problem
Domain
Variable
Constraint
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Local Search
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Selected Results
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Building Structure into Local Search for SAT
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IJCAI’07 Distinguished Paper Award
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gNovelty+ (2007), R+AdaptNovelty+ (2005)
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Local Search (JLC), New SAT encoding (CP’06)
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Resolution + SLS (AAAI’05)
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Genetic programming (CEC’04, PRICAI’04)
Winner of SAT Competition Gold Medals
Temporal Reasoning
Hybrid Search
Evolving Algorithms for CSPs
John Thornton
Research Challenges
Parameter free clause weighting local
search (for SAT competition)
 Exploiting structure (dependency lattice)
 Local search method for UNSAT
problems (IJCAI’97 challenge problem)
 Methods for solving problems in non –
CNF form (bio-informatics, model checking)
 Handling over-constrained problems
 Transforming complex problems into
CSPs/SAT
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John Thornton
New Research Directions
 Hierarchical
Temporal Memory
Using insights from computational
neuroscience to build more robust and
flexible pattern recognition machines
 Exploiting temporal
connections between
inputs (temporal pooling)
 Combining recognition
with prediction
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John Thornton
The Teams
IIIS CSP/SAT:
Abdul Sattar, Wayne
Pullan, Duc Nghia Pham, Stuart Bain,
Lingzhong Zhou, Matthew Beaumont, Valnir
Ferreira Jr. Abdelraouf Ishtaiwi
NICTA CSP/SAT: Michael Maher,
Charles Gretton, John Slaney, Anbulagan
IIIS HTM: Michael Blumenstein, Trevor
Hine, Jolon Faichney, Richard Speter
John Thornton
Thank You
Questions?
(also see www.cit.gu.edu/~johnt/)
John Thornton