Local Search for Computationally Hard Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Since the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a new field of modern science and engineering  about 6 decades ago, concerted efforts have been made on designing and developing expressively adequate languages to represent knowledge about real world domains, and building computational tools to efficiently reason with these representations. Indeed, these two aspects of intelligent systems remain the fundamental challenges of AI.  This talk will first give an overview of the AI challenge in general. We will then focus on the constraint satisfaction paradigm that has become a powerful approach to model real world problems and solve them efficiently using general purpose constraint solving techniques. We will present some of our recent successes on solving the propositional satisfiability problems, and some open issues.

Bio: Professor Abdul Sattar is the founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems and a Professor of  Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Griffith University. He is also a Research Leader at National ICT Australia (NICTA) Queensland Research Lab (QRL)  where he held  the position of  QRL Education Director, the leader of the SAFE Agents project (July 2005-June 2008), and currently leading the QRL node of the NICTA's largest project, Advance Technologies for Optimisation and Modelling In Constraints (ATOMIC).  He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology.  Prior to his career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).

He has won several awards starting from the national scholarships during his studies in India (1974-79), a Commonwealth scholarship in Canada (1985-1990), to a number of research grants. The main grants include 7 ARC Large/Discovery grants (worth approximately $1.5M). He has published over 120 refereed papers in international journals and conferences, a large number of these papers appeared in A* and A category conferences and journals. His research team has won 3 international awards in recent years including IJCAI 2007 Distinguished Paper award, Gold Medals in the 2005 and 2007 SAT solver competitions. He has supervised successful completion of 13 PhD students as a principal supervisor.

His current research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, intelligent scheduling, rational agents, propositional satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and computational proteomics.