Tsz-Chiu Au      Chiu

Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park

I am a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. I received my B.Eng. degree in Computer Science from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong. My advisor is Prof. Dana Nau. This is my CV.

Research Interests:
Research Accomplishments:
  • Coping with noise in non-zero-sum games. A noisy multi-agent environment is one in which a “noise gremlin” can randomly change the agents' actions. This can be used to model accidents or miscommunications. For example, in the famous Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD), even a small amount of noise can cause great difficulty for the agents. To cope with this problem, I devised a technique called symbolic noise detection (SND) to detect and correct errors caused by noise. The idea behind SND is that when there are strong incentives to cooperate, agents often behave deterministically, and these deterministic behaviors can be used to detect noise. In the 20th Anniversary Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition, my SND agent placed third in the “noise” category, and was the best performer among programs that had no “slave” programs feeding points to them. [PowerPoint Slides with animation] [PDF Slides without animation]
  • Synthesis of strategies from interaction traces. To create better agents in multi-agent environments, one may want to examine the observed behaviors of existing agents in order to combine their best skills. Therefore, I devised a technique to synthesize new composite strategies that combine the best behaviors from records of interactions among many different agents. In cross-validated experiments involving more than 50 agents, composite strategies produced from these agents were able to make large improvements in the performance of nearly all of the agents.
  • Managing volatile data for planning processes in semantic web service composition. Automated planning techniques have been applied to the semantic web, in particular, the composition of web services. An important issue in web service composition is information volatility during planning—the collected information may change or expire during or after the planning process. The expiration of collected data is a problem because it can invalidate the results generated by web services. I proposed several query management strategies for handling volatile data for planners, and theoretically analyzed the conditions under which the solutions returned by the planning process will remain valid. Our work is the first to look at this problem in the context of the semantic web.
Selected Publications:
  • T.-C. Au, S. Kraus, and D. Nau. Synthesis of Strategies from Interaction Traces Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'08). May 2008. To appear. [pdf] [data].
  • T.-C. Au and D. Nau. Is it Accidental or Intentional? A Symbolic Approach to the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma: 20 Years on, pp.231-262, World Scientific, 2007. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au, S. Kraus, and D. Nau. Symbolic noise detection in the noisy iterated chicken game and the noisy iterated battle of the sexes. In First International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD-2007), August 2007. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au. Dynamic Programming with Stochastic Opponent Models in Social Games. In First International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD-2007), August 2007. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au and D. Nau. Reactive Query Policies: A Formalism for Planning with Volatile External Information. IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Data Mining (CIDM), pp. 243-250, 2007. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au and D. Nau. The Incompleteness of Planning with Volatile External Information. Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), August 2006. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au, and D. Nau. Accident or Intention: That is the Question (in the Noisy Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma). Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS'06). pp. 561-568, May 2006. [pdf] [bibtex]. (The corresponding NECTAR paper in AAAI-06: [pdf])
  • T.-C. Au, U. Kuter and D. Nau. Web Service Composition with Volatile Information. Proceedings of the 4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC-2005), pp. 52-66, 2005. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • T.-C. Au, D. Nau, and V. Subrahamanian. Utilizing volatile external information during planning. Proceedings of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), pp. 647-651, August 2004. [pdf] [bibtex].
  • D. Nau, T.-C. Au, O. Ilghami, U. Kuter, H. Muņoz-Avila, J. W. Murdock, D. Wu, and F. Yaman. Applications of SHOP and SHOP2. IEEE Intelligent Systems 20:2, pp. 34-41, 2005. [pdf] [html] [bibtex].
  • D. Nau, T.-C. Au, O. Ilghami, U. Kuter, J. W. Murdock, D. Wu, and F. Yaman. SHOP2: An HTN planning system. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 20:379-404, December 2003. [pdf] [html] [bibtex].
  • H. Muņoz-Avila, D. S. Nau, and Tsz-Chiu Au. On the complexity of plan adaptation by derivational analogy in a universal classical planning framework. Proceedings of the European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR), pp. 13-27, September 4-7 2002. [pdf] [bibtex].
Education:
  • Ph.D. in Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park (2008--expected)
  • M.S. in Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park
  • B.Eng. in Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Contact Information:
  • Email: chiu (at) cs . umd . edu
  • Phone: (301) 405-2716
  • Address:

    Tsz-Chiu Au
    Department of Computer Science
    University of Maryland
    A. V. Williams Building
    College Park, MD 20742, U.S.A.
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