David Poole

Professor Emeritus

Office
ICCS
109
Office Phone #
604 822-6254

Academic Information

Ph.D., Australian National Univ. (1984); Post Doctoral Fellow, Univ. of Waterloo (1983-85); Assistant Professor, Univ. of Waterloo (1985-88); Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia (1988-93); Associate Professor, University of British Columbia (1993-98); Professor, University of British Columbia (1998-); Scholar, Canadian Inst. for Advanced Research (1992-95).

Research Areas

artificial intelligence

Interests

My goal is to understand the principles behind action in natural and artificial agents. I consider the question: what should an agent do based in its preferences (or goals), its background knowledge, (limited) perception of the environment, previous experience and limited computation?

Currently, my main research interests consider theoretical and empirical investigations of automated reasoning built on the foundations of logic, probability and decision theory for tasks such as diagnosis/recognition, design, planning and reacting with partial knowledge and imperfect sensors. I ask what is a natural compact representation and how can aspects of it be exploited computationally.

My main recent work has been in probabilistic reasoning and assumption-based logical reasoning. This includes developing a coherent theory, and empirical studies based on building efficient implementations, and developing methodologies for various applications. Different behaviour can be characterised by who chooses the assumptions: where nature chooses assumptions we have a logic-based characterisation of recognition/diagnosis incorporating probabilistic models such as Bayesian networks; much of the work on non-monotonic (default) reasoning can be seen as assumption-based reasoning where an adversary chooses the assumptions; where an agent can choose the assumptions we have a characterisation of design and planning. Combining these into a coherent framework that will look something like a logic-based decision/game theory with algorithms that exploit properties of various domains is a medium-term goal of my research.

Other interests include: algorithms for probabilistic reasoning, diagnosis and decision theory; preference elicitation; robotics; user modeling; foundations of diagnosis and recognition; planning under uncertainty and learning.

Keywords

planning

Courses

2023 Winter
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
2022 Winter
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
2020 Winter
CPSC_V 532P - Topics in Artificial Intelligence - Synthetic Data in the Era of Generative AI
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
CPSC_V 322 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
CPSC_V 322 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
2019 Winter
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
2018 Winter
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
2017 Winter
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 322 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
2016 Winter
CPSC_V 532P - Topics in Artificial Intelligence - Synthetic Data in the Era of Generative AI
CPSC_V 312 - Functional and Logic Programming
2015 Winter
CPSC_V 522 - Artificial Intelligence II
CPSC_V 322 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence