Ready for lift off.  NASA is set to launch space shuttle Discovery on Thursday after months of delay from a hydrogen gas leakage that is now repaired.

Sainthood is just around the corner. Pope John Paul’s most anticipated beatification ceremony will bring him one step closer to sainthood.  So get your tickets fast but beware of fraudulent vendors.

Such gay news! Facebook’s relationship status is now gay-friendly.

Rock on a day early. Radiohead is releasing its new album “The King of Limbs” ahead of its schedule.

That’s right,  THE PIRATES ARE HERE …. to stay!

Minus the wooden leg, screeching parrot, and eye patch, the Somali pirates have swept the high seas.  True buccaneers of the 21st century,  swords and cannons are replaced by RPG-7 launchers and assault rifles. Not to mention the high speedboats that chase down large ships in a matter of minutes.

And these pirates don’t discriminate between  victims, be it U.S., French, Chinese, Indian, or even African vessels.  In fact, the ships and their cargo is no what is valuable, but rather the people on board who are ransomed  off for booty.  Much to everyone’s surprise, the Somali pirates have earned a reputation for peaceful conduct, for the most part.   Once captured, it would appear no one makes a visit to Davy Jones’ Locker.

Meanwhile, Somali pirates hijacked a yacht with four Americans on board Friday afternoon in the Indian Ocean.

“serous concern”

Surely, the time for concern is over, and the time for action should be …. right about now.  Especially with the recent sentencing of a Somali pirate who brutally attacked a U.S. merchant ship captain.

If that does not raise a flag then this should.  It is reported that Somali piracy is currently at its HIGHEST levels, “with more than 40 ships and 800 seamen currently held.”

Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Metareasoning in Adaptive Systems

Dr. Joshua Jones
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

1:00-2:15pm Friday, 4 March 2011, ITE 227, UMBC

Metareasoning, or reasoning about reasoning, is a process by which a system explicitly accesses (monitors and/or controls) its own reasoning. It is a widely held belief in AI that metareasoning is a cruicial part of human-level intelligence, and it could be considered part of consciousness. In this talk I will avoid such philosophical claims, and instead focus on some more practical applications of metareasoning in software systems that learn and adapt in changing environments. Specifically, I will give an overview of the basic metareasoning architecture and then discuss three systems: Augur, a classification system; GAIA, an adaptive game-playing system; and MCL, a general-purpose metareasoning shell.

Dr. Joshua Jones is a a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he works on a number of projects with the CORAL and MAPLE labs. These include the development of novel techniques for grammar induction, learning of branching lexicographic preference models, metareasoning in a robotics domain using the Meta-Cognitive Loop (MCL) reasoning system and applications of machine learning methods in medical and financial domains.

Dr. Jones earned his PhD in May 2010 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as a member of the Design Intelligence Laboratory led by Ashok Goel. His primary research interest is in the area of Artificial Intelligence. He works mostly on learning, which his dissertation viewed as a result of metareasoning — where changes to an agent's knowledge or processes are produced by a deliberative process of agent introspection (self-diagnosis) and self-repair. His dissertation research involved designing both reasoning processes capable of such learning, and knowledge representations capable of supporting those reasoning processes, all of which are implemented in a system called Augur. Augur is also integrated with several statistical machine learning algorithms, and as such, the work is in part intended to establish a bridge between machine learning and knowledge-based approaches to AI.

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