From: hanks@june.cs.washington.edu (Steve Hanks)
Subject: UW's program in AI
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 18:27:42 GMT

Well, shameless self-promotion seems the order of the 
day, and I for one am not above it.  Here's some 
information about our graduate program.

======================================================
Graduate Studies in AI at the University of Washington
=======================================================

We have three faculty doing "mainstream" AI research:

Oren Etzioni (CMU 1991) --- Machine learning; integrated
agent architectures for software domains (UNIX softbots).

Steve Hanks (Yale 1990) --- Planning and decision-making
under uncertainty;  temporal reasoning;  probabilistic 
reasoning.

Dan Weld (MIT 1989) --- Qualitative reasoning about 
physical systems;  planning; diagnosis.

Recently our research efforts have converged on various
issues related to planning.  You might check out the recent
KR92 and AI planning systems proceedings to get an idea of what 
we're currently interested in:

    Etzioni, Hanks, Weld, Draper, Lesh, Williamson
      "An Approach to Planning with Incomplete Information"
      Proceedings, KR92

    Penberthy and Weld
      "UCPOP:  A Sound, Complete, Partial-Order Planner for ADL"
      Proceedings, KR92

    Haddawy and Hanks
      "Representations for Decision-Theoretic Planning:
        Utility Functions for Deadline Goals"
      Proceedings, KR92

    Hanks and Weld
      "Systematic Adaptation for Case-Based Planning"
      Proceedings, AI Planning Systems

    Williamson and Hanks
      "Efficient Temporal Reasoning for Plan Projection"
      Proceedings, AI Planning Systems

Oren has a couple of papers in the Machine Learning 92 
proceedings that reflect his current learning-related work.
   
UW has several faculty members  working in AI-related areas
as well:

    Alan Borning
      Constraint languages, logic programming.
    Alistair Holden
      Speech recognition, applications of neural networks.
    Ira Kalet (department of Radiation Oncology)
      Medical applications of AI.
    Richard Ladner
      Computational learning theory.
    Linda Shapiro
      Machine vision, image understanding.
    Steve Tanimoto
      Machine vision, computers and education.

Apart from what I think is a very strong and enthusiastic group 
of people in AI and AI-related areas, the department is a 
really nice place to work:

    -- You get a first-rate education in computer science.
       We have excellent groups in systems and architecture,
       VLSI, theory, graphics, languages, and software engineering.  
       You have to take courses in many of these areas, and 
       collaboration among the various groups is encouraged.

    -- It's a very open, friendly environment.  There are 
       no barriers between students or faculty in different 
       research areas, between students and faculty, between 
       junior and senior faculty.

   --  Seattle is a great place to live.  (This last comment 
       applies to prospective grad students only.  The 
       rest of you stay away!)

If you'd like more information about the program you can 
direct technical/research questions to me, or to Oren, 
or to Dan:

    {etzioni,hanks,weld}@cs.washington.edu.

Administrative questions, like requests for application 
materials, are best fielded by 

    grad-admissions@cs.washington.edu

Application deadline is February 1, I believe.

Steve.