On April 2, GAIPS from INESC-ID will host an open entrance talk by Shlomo Zilberstein from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Professor Zilberstein will talk about his work on Competence Aware Systems (CAS), which are systems that have the ability to represent and learn a model for self-competence and use it to decide how to best use the agent’s own abilities, as well as any available human assistance.

Date & Time: April 2, 14h00 – 15h00
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo (Room 1.38)

Abstract: “Competence is the ability to do something well. Competence awareness is the ability to represent and learn a model of self competence and use it to decide how to best use the agent’s own abilities as well as any available human assistance. This capability is critical for the success and safety of autonomous systems that operate in the open world. In this talk, I introduce two types of competence-aware systems (CAS), namely Type I and Type II CAS. The former refers to a stand-alone system that can learn its own competence and use it to fine-tune itself to the characteristics of the problem instance at hand, without human assistance. The latter is a human-aware system that can use a self-competence model to optimize the utilization of costly human assistive actions. I describe recent results that demonstrate the benefits of the two types of competence awareness in different contexts, including autonomous vehicle decision making.”

Short Bio: Shlomo Zilberstein is Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst. His research focuses on the foundations and applications of planning and resource-bounded reasoning, which allow complex systems to make decisions while coping with uncertainty, missing information, and limited computational resources. Zilberstein is a fellow of AAAI, ACM, and AAIA. He is recipient of the University of Massachusetts Chancellor’s Medal (2019), IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award (2019), AAAI Distinguished Service Award (2019), and National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1996). He is the past editor-in-chief of JAIR, former chair of the AAAI Conference, former president of ICAPS, former councilor of AAAI, and the chairman of the AI Access Foundation.