A Brief BiographyI received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in August of 2003. During my graduate career, I worked under the guidance of John E. Laird and as part of the University of Michigan's Soar Research Group. For the past six years my research has focused on methods for facilitating the design of intelligent agents. In the early parts of graduate school, this took the form of comparing the performance of the Soar and CLIPS agent architectures. Results from this study suggested potential improvements to Soar which he implemented as Soar v. 8.4. More recently, I have investigated low-cost methods for validating and debugging complex intelligent agents. This work led to a novel approach for comparing two agents' behaviors called Behavior Bounding. This formed the basis for my dissertation work. After serving a brief post-doctoral position in Ann Arbor, I traveled for four months through South East Asia and India with my wife, Jennifer. I am now an assistant professor at Washington State University's Vancouver campus. Since coming to WSU Vancouver, my research has taken two directions. The first continues and extends my dissertation work in AI, focusing on methods for developing safe and robust agent systems. The second explores issues related to the pedagogy of computer science: how we can improve learning outcomes, recruit and retain students, and build interesting course materials. |