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Visualized Decision Making and Planning

I am representing the Honors Department as a part of a team of students and faculty at both Cal Poly and the University of Kentucky that are studying the Visualization of Decision-Theoretic Plans. Here are some of the documents and information related to our research.

Description:

Planning is a commonplace human activity, which is typically abstracted in terms of choosing sequences of actions that lead to a specific goal, or maximize certain rewards. Decision-theoretic planning is a subarea of artificial intelligence that has as its goal building software for planning in different domains.

In simple domains, planning is deterministic: the exact effects of a ll actions are known in advance. However, most real domains in which decision-theoretic planning is desired have actions whose exact effects cannot be predicted in advance. For example, it is the role of an academic advisorto suggest courses for students that best fit their goal of obtaining a specific degree (or receiving a specific education). However, an action of take a course does not have a deterministic effect: students may pass the course with various degree of achievement (A, B ,C), they may fail the course, or withdraw from the course completely. When long-term plans are made in domains such as academic advising, the liklihood of specific outcomes of actions also needs to be taken into account.

This leads to a new formal notion of a plan (or policy), and a drastically new approach to building and evaluating plans. Methodology for building good decision-theoretic plans in the presence of uncertainty exists and is well-studied, however, the problem of presenting computed plans to end-users is not.

The proposed project will concentrate on building software for presenting decision-theoretic plans to their consumers. We will use academic advising as a sample domain , and Cal Poly students as consumers. The goals of the multi-disciplinary team working on the project will be to:

(a) learn and understand the notion of a decision-theoretic plan;
(b) develop a student's cognitive model of a decision-theoretic plan in the academic advising domain (this stage may potentially involve a number of experimental studies to assess how Cal Poly students evaluate academic plans);
(c) design and implement software for display of decision-theoretic plans that incorporates the developed cognitive model;
(d) evaluate the utility of the implemented software.

Advisor: Dr. Alexander Dekhtyar
Current Teammates: Dara Stepanek, Evan Hecht
Team Alumni: Kyle Cushing