Alan Mackworth
Professor Emeritus
Academic Information
B.A.Sc., Univ. of Toronto (1966); A.M., Harvard Univ. (1967); D.Phil., Sussex Univ. (1974); Lecturer, Univ. of Toronto (1967-70); Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia (1974); Associate Professor, University of British Columbia (1979); Professor, University of British Columbia (1984); Institute Fellow, Canadian Inst. for Advanced Research.
Research Areas
Interests
The goal of my research program is to understand and build intelligent systems. I am particularly interested in the use of knowledge by agents who perceive, reason and act in the world. The central focus is constraint-based computational intelligence.
The development of constraint programming, which we have pioneered, has already proven useful in a wide variety of applications in robotics, vision, scheduling, simulation, diagnosis and repair. Zhang and I have recently developed the online Constraint Net model for specifying, designing, verifying, simulating, and implementing intelligent, embedded, real-time, hybrid systems, such as robots.
In our Lab for Computational Intelligence (LCI), we are building various sensor-based robotic systems. The overall framework is to characterize the knowledge that an intelligent system must have in its internal model and to show how it can acquire information about the world, integrate it into its model and then act to change the world.
We are building teams of mobile robots, with real-time visually based control systems, for experimental tasks like soccer playing, navigation and telerobotics. We proposed and built the world's first soccer-playing robots. These systems provide a framework for driving the development of practical theories of real-time constraint-based computational intelligence. My main goal is to develop a clean theoretical and practical framework for the design and implementation of constraint-based agents.