The Turing Center
Department of Computer Science and Engg
Paul Allen Center, Box 352350
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, 98195, U.S.A.
Email : mausam AT cs DOT washington DOT edu
Phone : 206-685-1964 (O), 206-979-7038 (C)
I am happy to announce the release of a monograph titled
Planning with Markov Decision Processes: An AI Perspective,
co-written with
Andrey Kolobov.
Research
My main research interests are in the field of Artificial Intelligence. At present I am working on the following projects:
- Open Information Extraction: We hope to overcome the "knowledge-acquisition bottleneck" by automatically extracting information from natural language text in a domain-independent manner. We work on improving the quality of Open IE extractors by pushing their precision and recall. A recent paper on this work.
- NLP over Microblogs: Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter have exploded in popularity in the recent times. Tweets often represent the most up-to-date information and "buzz" on a vast spectrum of topics, however, their sheer number adds to huge information overload. We recently released a suite of NLP tools for tweets. We are currently designing automated information extraction systems over Twitter. A recent paper and a demo of automatically generated calendar of events.
- AI Applications to Crowd-sourcing: Crowd-sourcing has taken over the business world by storm in the last few years. Although it is touted as "Artificial Artificial Intelligence", there are huge opportunities for AI to contribute to its success. A vision paper describes our approach to this synergy. We have investigated decision-theoretic techniques to automatically control workflows on a crowd-sourcing platform such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, and have obtained significant quality improvements for the same price. Recent papers on this work: Paper 1 and Paper 2.
- Large-scale Probabilistic Planning: Solving large Markov Decision Processes by combining several optimal as well as approximate techniques. We hope to alleviate the memory bottleneck in solving the large MDPs and scale to large, industry sized probabilistic planning problems. Some recent papers on this work: Paper 1 and Paper 2. Our planner, Glutton, was runners up in 2011 International Probabilistic Planning competition.
- Commonsense Knowledge Extraction: Automatically creating corpora of commonsense knowledge based on reasoning over extracted information from the Web. We are currently building a large repository of relational n-grams -- a semantic analog to the n-grams corpus. In the past we automatically learned the selectional preferences and meta-properties of relations present in natural language text. A recent demo on selectional preferences and a recent paper.
A list of my publications can be found here.
My Curriculum Vitae is available here.
A complete list of released softwares, demos and data can be found
here.
At AAAI'12 I co-taught a tutorial on MDPs
for Probabilistic Planning.
In July'12 I co-organized the UW-MSR Summer Institute on Crowdsourcing Personalized
Online Education.
At Planning & Scheduling School'12 I co-taught a tutorial on Probabilistic Planning.
At ICAPS'08 I co-organized a workshop titled A Reality Check for Planning and Scheduling Under Uncertainty.
At ICAPS'07 I co-taught a tutorial on Probabilistic
Temporal Planning.
Hobbies
In my personal time, I can be found listening to, playing, or singing hindustani classical music. I perform with a local light Indian music band called Pratidhwani (our last show was Kashish in December 2012). I was also involved with the local cricket tournament where I try my fingers at off-spinning. Movies and cooking take up whatever remaining free time I have.
Here is a website I host that contains interesting links about hindustani classical music.