Page type: student

David J. Finton's Home Page; David J. Finton; finton@cs.wisc.edu; Computer Sciences Department; University of Wisconsin-Madison; 1210 West Dayton Street; Madison, WI 53706; (608) 262-9275;Welcome to my page! I'm a grad student / research;nerd;in artificial;intelligence;here at the;University of Wisconsin-Madison.;I grew up in;Grand Rapids, Michigan,;(which is the;Late Show's;ex-Home Office),;earned a degree in;math at Michigan State,;and a master's in;computer science;here at the UW.;I'm now a dissertator at this;institution,;after taking a little over a year to develop traffic measurements software;for;AT&T;after my first thesis advisor left Wisconsin.;When I'm not at my trusty;NeXTstation;or the library, I enjoy;playing trumpet and piano, listening to;"longhair music",;playing volleyball with the;InterVarsity;folks, and contributing to the SuperSoaker arms race.;If you have any comments about my pages, feel free to use my;comment form,;or just send me e-mail.;Or finger my account;to see my current plan and whether I'm on the system.;Gainful employment:;I am a TA for;CS 540,;Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.;Current Project:;If computers are so smart, why do we have to understand them?;Making machines more;intelligent;is the goal of Artificial Intelligence. To me, the essence of intelligence;is the ability to learn and adapt, to learn to act;appropriately in order to reach our goals.;Reinforcement learning treats this problem in the general case where;the system has outputs to control actions that can change its environment,;and it has inputs through which it senses its environment. It also has an input;for reinforcement, which is a weak kind of feedback which can be expressed as;a positive or negative number. So, instead of having a teacher to present the;system with input/output pairs, the system instead receives "thumbs up" or;"thumbs down" at irregular intervals.;My work has focussed on how the need to;distinguish good actions from bad ones can direct the process of building a;good representation of the environment in terms of relevant, or;important features. (See my note on;importance-based;feature extraction). Currently I am applying this notion of;importance to the problem of learning to balance the need to;explore the world with the need to perform optimally (exploration vs. exploitation).;I am also investigating ways of using importance to make the learning;process more efficient by allowing the system to specify the starting points for;its learning experiments;(active learning). My goal is to develop a better understanding of intelligent;adaptation. I hope that this will provide a basis for intelligent action which;will also benefit from knowledge-based and task-based work. See my (really;out-of-date, sorry!);reinforcement learning page;for more information.;My Hotlist;This is;my browser-independent hotlist. I keep a copy here so I can;access it from any of the browser/platform combinations I use.;It's actually my Bookmarks file from;OmniWeb,;which is a;more elegant and more functional browser than Netscape, in my opinion. OmniWeb;is currently only available for NEXTSTEP, but will be available for;all the;OpenStep;variants when OpenStep is released.;My Editorial Pages:;My;response;to the Jehovah's Witnesses on the deity of Christ;Wisconsin Sites:;; InterVarsity Graduate Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Check out the;weather;in the City of Madison; WISC-TV's;Star Trek page;has programming information and links to other pages.; The ISTHMUS Daily Page;Some of My Favorite Places to Visit:;The Web Nebulae, and;; NASA pictures; The World Wide Study Bible, and;; CrossSearch; The F-Minor Glenn Gould Homepage; The Farside Daily; Star Trek and;; Star Trek: Voyager;Enter;; The Dilbert Zone;Roam the world with;; The Virtual Tourist; Stereograms!; How To Tell If Your Head's About To Blow Up; A true NeXT-head showing what he thinks of Bill Gates.;And now, a word from;; my sponsor.;Last modified: October 31, 1996;finton@cs.wisc.edu;