MnRI Colloquium: Maria Gini

Title: Decentralized allocation of tasks to agents and robots

Speaker: Maria Gini, CSE Distinguished Professor, Distinguished University Teaching Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Abstract: Task allocation and distributed decision-making are common in computer science, robotics, and many related fields.  Most algorithms solve the problem in a centralized way as an optimization problem.  I am interested in solving task allocation problems with no central authority or only a minimalistic central authority, such as an auctioneer. The methods I have developed work for physical agents that move in 2D space, such as robots or delivery vehicles, and methods for virtual agents. I am especially interested in methods that work with temporal and precedence constraints or for tasks that have costs that increase over time. In this talk, I will present examples of task allocation problems in multiple contexts, some requiring planning in advance and some requiring decisions in real time.

Bio: Maria Gini is a College of Science & Engineering Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.  She works on decision-making for autonomous agents in many application domains, ranging from swarm robotics to distributed methods for the allocation of tasks, methods for robots to explore an unknown environment, and navigation in dense crowds.  She is a Fellow of the AAAI, ACM, and IEEE.  She has published more than 60 journal articles and more than 300 conference papers, and book chapters.  She is Editor in Chief of Robotics and Autonomous Systems and is on the editorial board of numerous journals, including Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Current Robotics Reports, and Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering.