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Epistemic Planning: Integrating Higher-Order Social Cognition into Intelligent Planning Agents

An IMC Seminar with Thomas Bolander.

Info about event

Time

Tuesday 4 February 2014,  at 11:00 - 12:30

Location

Aarhus University, Nobelparken, building 1483-3rd floor, IMC meeting room (312)

Organizer

Interacting Minds Centre

Automated planning is a major branch of artificial intelligence. It deals with the problem of automatically computing sequences of actions (plans) to achieve certain goals. Existing formalisms for automated planning rarely deal with the multi-agent case in which planning agents have to take the beliefs, actions and goals of other agents into account. However, such multi-agent reasoning capabilities are essential to achieve efficient and intelligent communication and collaboration in multi-agent settings; for instance in hospital robots working in a shared environment with humans, virtual agents in computer games or intelligent personal assistants.

In my talk I will present a formalism for multi-agent planning that I call epistemic planning. It is planning based on dynamic epistemic logic (DEL), the currently most influential logical framework for reasoning about actions in the multi-agent case. Epistemic planning supports arbitrary levels of higher-order reasoning, that is, arbitrary nesting of beliefs about beliefs. The formalism can not only be used to compute plans, but also to explain observations (abduction) and to track beliefs of other agents through given sequences of actions. The latter ability can be used to solve false-belief tasks like the Sally-Anne test. 

In my talk, I will introduce the general framework of epistemic planning with particular focus on how the formalism can be used to construct intelligent agents capable of solving and inventing false-belief tasks, even higher-order ones.