Robert P. Goldman

New Stuff

• I am first author of the paper "Highly-automated, high-throughput replication of yeast-based logic circuit design assessments," published in Oxford University Press Synthetic Biology, October 2022.
• Another paper growing out of work on SD2 in OUP Synthetic Biology, "Robustness and reproducibility of simple and complex synthetic logic circuit designs using a DBTL loop," first author Breschine Cummins. March 2023.
• I'm co-author with Dan Bryce, and a cast of thousands on a paper, "Round Trip: An Automated Pipeline for Experimental Design, Execution, and Analysis" in ACS Synthetic Biology describing work on the SD2 program. DOI is /10.1021/acssynbio.1c00305.
• My ORCID ID is 0000-0002-5851-4851. Not news, exactly, but an update, nevertheless.
• I was program co-chair (with Michael Katz and Susanne Biundo) of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Originally, ICAPS-2021 was to be held in Guangzhou, but because of the pandemic, it was held entirely remotely.
• Hierarchical Task Network Planning in Common Lisp: the case of SHOP3," with Ugur Kuter, in the Proceedings of the European Lisp Symposium, Genova, Italy, April 2019.
  Slides from the conference presentation.
• "A Bayesian Model for Experiment Choice in Synthetic Biology," describes work I have done with a large group of collaborators to develop a Bayesian model of experiments in Synthetic Biology, to support optimizing experiment choice.
• XPLAN Posters from ICAPS 2018: With the XPLAN team -- working on experiment planning for Synthetic Biology as part of the DARPA SD2 program -- I had two posters, one at the HTN Planning workshop, and one in the demo session.
• Decentralized HTN Planning: Ugur Kuter, Josh Hamell, and I had a paper in the HTN Planning workshop at ICAPS 2018 entitled "Assumption-based Decentralized HTN Planning."
• "Plan Recognition for Network Analysis: Preliminary Report", a paper on using plan recognition to perform network analysis on (simulated) criminal enterprises, describing some extensions to the Yappr plan recognition system, and Nate Blaylock's Monroe generator for plan recognition corpora. This paper was presented at the PAIR workshop in February 2018.
• A paper on using planning technology to combine multiple different simulation systems: "Human/autonomy collaboration for automated generation of intelligence products," with Phil DiBona, Jason Schlachter, and Ugur Kuter, which is in the 2017 IEEE SPIE proceedings.
• A position paper describing a lifted plan graph planner, HOKAGE, "HOKAGE: A Heuristic Lifted Planning Algorithm for Generating Diverse Generalized Plans," for the Generalized Planning workshop at ICAPS 2017.
• A paper describing the Hy-CIRCA architecture and methods for planning for hybrid (discrete/continuous) systems with non-linear continuous dynamics, "A Hybrid Architecture for Correct-by-Construction Hybrid Planning and Control," with Daniel Bryce, Michael J. S. Pelican, David J. Musliner, and Kyungmin Bae, which appeared in the proceedings of the 2016 NASA Formal Methods Workshop.

John Maraist and I had a paper in the 2015 Qualitative Reasoning Workshop that describes our experiments to assess the accuracy of System Z+ qualitative probability, as used in the Scyllarus and MIFD (STRATUS) systems.

Ugur Kuter and I had a paper, "Measuring Plan Diversity: Pathologies in Existing Approaches and A New Plan Distance Metric," on the use of algorithmic complexity (approximated using normalized compression distance) as a plan-plan distance measure for plan diversity. It appeared in the Proceedings of AAAI 2015, and you can find it here.

I had a paper with Dan Bryce, Dave Musliner, and Sicun Gao (CMU) on planning in hybrid (discrete/continuous) domains, using the dReal SMT solver. Full disclosure: my contributions were minimal: almost all the work was done by Dan and Sicun. "SMT-based Nonlinear PDDL+ Planning" is here.

Computer Science Research

XPLAN

XPLAN is the eXperiment PLANning system that we (SIFT) have built to support remote use of highly automated wet labs, funded by DARPA's SD2E (Synergistic Discovery and Design Environment) program. As part of the XPLAN project, I have been working on Bayesian models to support (approximately) optimizing experiment choice and on HTN planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search for partially observable environments (like scientific experimentation).

Some papers:

• "A Bayesian Model for Experiment Choice in Synthetic Biology," with Dan Bryce, Puja Trivedi, and several others from SIFT and Strateos. Presented at the 2019 AAAI Fall Symposium on AI and Synthetic Biology.

STRATUS

The STRATUS project (ongoing) is part of DARPA's Mission-centric Resilient Cloud program. It aims to develop computer security techniques to protect cloud based computing systems.

The only paper so far describing STRATUS is one from the AHANS workshop at SASO 2013, "Comparing Strategic and Tactical Responses to Cyber Threats," (first author, Jordan Thayer).

SMITE (Computer Security, Intrusion Detection)

The SMITE project, completed in 2011, was part of DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program. SMITE aimed to perform intrusion detection on ultra high speed network traffic (up to 100 Gbps).

My particular role in the project was to work on what is called intrusion detection system (IDS) "correlation" (correlation is actually a misleading term, what is really meant here is "fusion.")

Even more specifically, my work was in the component that is called the "evidence assessor." This component uses qualitative Bayesian reasoning to weigh competing hypotheses for clusters of IDS resports. Often these competing explanations weigh malign (malware sweeping the network in order to spread) against benign (print daemons looking for networked printers) explanations; the evidence assessor helps address the problem of false positives that has plagued IDSes.

This project continued work on techniques that were first developed in the ARGUS/Scyllarus project.

Papers from SMITE:

• "Model-based Intrusion Assessment in Common Lisp ," with Steven A. Harp, in working notes of the ICAPS 2009 Workshop on Computer Security and Artificial Intelligence (SecArt), Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009. This paper is a mild revision and reformatting of the ILC paper, listed below, which is the authoritative (archival) version.
• "Model-based Intrusion Assessment in Common Lisp," with Steven A. Harp Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, Cambridge, MA, 2009.

The ARGUS project

One of my last research projects at Honeywell, and one of those of which I was most proud was the ARGUS project. The ARGUS project was work in the area of computer security, specifically intrusion detection. The objective of the ARGUS project was to provide a framework for fusing the reports of multiple intrusion detection systems into a single unified view of a computer installation's security situation. This work builds on my interest in qualitative probability and Bayesian approaches to information fusion.

A couple of papers on the Argus project, were published at the DISCEX-2001 conference. Drafts are available:

• Information Modeling for Intrusion Report Aggregation, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.
• Plan Recognition in Intrusion Detection Systems, Postscript and Adobe Acrobat.

Integrated learning (Planning, Knowledge Representation, Semantic Web)

I led a team of researchers including SIFT and University of Maryland as part of the BBN-led POIROT team for DARPA's Integrated Learning program, which aimed at integrating together a large number of intelligent systems to learn workflows from observing humans using web services.

Papers from Integrated Learning:

2010

• "Shopper: a system for executing and simulating expressive plans," Proceedings of ICAPS 2010, Toronto, Canada, 2010. short paper with John Maraist. There was also be a demonstration of this system at ICAPS 2010.

2009

• "A Semantics for HTN Methods," in the Proceedings of ICAPS 2009, Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009.
• "Partial Observability, Quantification, and Iteration for Planning: Work in Progress," in working notes of the ICAPS 2009 Workshop on Generalized Planning, Thessaloniki, Greece, September, 2009.
• "SHOPPER: Interpreter for a high-level web services language," with John Maraist, in the Proceedings of the International Lisp Conference, Cambridge, MA, March 2009.
• "LTML -- a language for representing semantic web service workflow procedures," with Mark Burstein, et al., To appear in the working notes of the "Semantics for the Rest of Us" workshop at the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009).
• "Plan aggregation for strong cyclic planning in nondeterministic domains," with Ron Alford, Ugur Kuter, and Dana Nau, Artificial Intelligence, v. 216, pp. 206-232, 2014.

2008

• "Using Classical Planners to Solve Nondeterministic Planning Problems," with Ugur Kuter, Dana Nau and Elnatan Reisner, in the Proceedings of ICAPS 2008, Sydney, Australia, September 2008.

2007

• "HOTRiDE: Hierarchical Ordered Task Replanning in Dynamic Environments," with N. Fazil Ayan, Ugur Kuter, and Fusun Yaman, on replanning and execution monitoring of HTNs.
• "Conditionalization: Adapting forward-chaining planners to partially observable environments," with Ugur Kuter, Dana Nau, Elnatan Reisner, Proceedings of ICAPS-2007.

Planning for Uninhabited Air Vehicles (UAVs)

I've been doing a lot of work on planning for UAVs in the past years. This is closely related to my interest in Planning for Intelligent UIs, since we're trying to use AI planners to make it easier to command complex behaviors of autonomous systems. Unfortunately, the pace of this work has been such that I have not had time to write much about it. Here are some snippets:

• With Mark Boddy, I taught a tutorial on planner domain modeling at ICAPS05 (June 2005).
• Most of this work has been funded under two U.S. government SBIR contracts: PVACS and TUSC.
• At the ICAPS 2004 workshop on Connecting Planning Theory with Practice, I presented a paper with some lessons learned about using the SHOP2 planner in a UAV control interface.
• I've been contributing to the maintenance of the SHOP2 HTN planning system.

Planning and Controller Synthesis

My work in automatic controller synthesis has mostly been done in collaboration with my colleague, David Musliner. He introduced me to the CIRCA architecture he developed (while at the University of Michigan). CIRCA is a novel architecture for doing intelligent control in hard real-time. I have since done work on incorporating model-checking into the architecture, doing abstraction-based controller synthesis, and extending the modeling capabilities for hierarchical control.

In 2001 I participated in the NASA New Millennium Program planning process, and to be on the program committee of the AAAI Symposium on Model-Based Validation of Intelligence, to be held at Stanford in March, 2001.

In 2002, I presented results from this work at the 2002 Workshop on Hybrid Control: Control and Computation (HSCC-2002).

In 2005, Musliner, Pelican, and I wrote a paper about incremental verification in controller synthesis at the Third Workshop on Model Checking and Artificial Intelligence (MoChArt05).

February 2006: Our paper on incremental verification in controller synthesis has been published in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. You may find the paper through Elsevier's ScienceDirect website.

For recent papers in this area, click here.

My work on planning and controller synthesis grew out of earlier work on planning in conditions of incomplete information.

Information Fusion

I am interested in the use of Bayesian networks (belief networks, causal probabilistic networks) to do information fusion. I have worked on this in the context of troubleshooting abnormal situations in oil refineries (in the context of Honeywell's project on Abnormal Situation Management), and am now exploring the use of belief networks for information fusion in computer network intrusion detection (see the Argus project).

Planning with Incomplete Information

I became interested in work on planning under uncertainty as an outgrowth of my interest in general aspects of reasoning under uncertainy. Some of my early work in this area was concerned with developing a better understanding of algorithms for conditional planning, such as CNLP and Cassandra. This led me to work on formalizing the problem of conditional planning, and the development of algorithms for conditional linear planning and epsilon-safe planning. Some relevant papers include:

• Representing Uncertainy in Simple Planners (from KR-94): Postscript only;
• Conditional Linear Planning (from AIPS-94): Postscript and pdf;
• Epsilon-Safe Planning (from UAI-94): Postscript and pdf;
• Expressive Planning and Explicit Knowledge (from AIPS-96): Postscript and pdf;

These papers were all written with Mark S. Boddy at Honeywell Laboratories.

Planning for Intelligent User Interfaces

Through work with colleagues in user-centered design, notably Chris Miller, I have become interested in exploring the ways that planning systems, particularly constraint-based planning systems, can provide a user-interface to advanced control systems. One of the systems my group at Honeywell built was a multi-agent constraint-based planner (see below). Much of that work was done in conjunction with my colleague Karen Haigh.

In the course of this work, I became interested in using optimization as a way to manage user interaction for intelligent systems. With some colleagues, I have written this work up in a paper that appeard in the 2005 proceedings of the American Helicopter Society's International Specialists' Meeting on Unmanned Rotorcraft: "Optimizing to Satisfice."

In 2006, a paper entitled "Delegation Interfaces for a Dynamic and Unpredictable Task: A Mobile Target Tracking Example," with my colleagues Chris Miller and Harry Funk, was presented at the NATO RTO Human Factors and Medicine Panel (HFM) Symposium which was held in Biarritz, France, 9-11 October 2006. That paper is available from a university site in France. Word format, I'm afraid.

A paper about the general approach, but written for a human factors audience, rather than an AI audience appeared at the HFES conference: "The Playbook Approach to Adaptive Automation," Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 49th Annual Meeting, 2005.

Miscellaneous

From 2005 through 2007 I worked on the DARPA Coordinators program. This was a research program investigating coordination across multiple agents that execute complex, hierarchical tasks, in a dynamic environment. See multi-agent coordination.

My earliest work at Honeywell Technology Center was done on planning under uncertainty, and on constraint-based scheduling, specifically for batch manufacturing (a kind of manufacturing that is a hybrid between continuous and discrete manufacturing. For information on this work, and an off-print of an article from IEEE Intelligent Systems, send me some email.

Another offshoot of my work on controller synthesis has been an interest in verification. Here is a paper I co-authored, appearing in the proceedings of the 2001 Spin Workshop, describing work on verification at Honeywell Laboratories.