Crackpot

In our lab, we are building a real-time planning system in C++, called Crackpot. A planning system can reason about which set of actions need to be taken in order to achieve specified goals. For example, if a robot Wall-e is asked to fetch a drink from the local store, it must internally generate a plan to reach the store, buy the drink and then return back home.

In our related games lab, Crackpot will be used in a story planning project. It will serve as an engine to automatically develop plans or "recipes" for story content generation, with the goal to optimize player experience.

Crackpot is a general (the technical term is domain-independent), real-time, dynamic planning system. Being general, it can be used for automated planning across diverse applications.

Crackpot is a public domain, open source software. See https://sourceforge.net/projects/crackpot/. See also my blog on Crackpot.

My Research

I am interested in artificial intelligence, automated planning, parallel computing, multi-agent systems and optimization.

Right now I am working in a central field of Aritificial Intelligence called Automated Planning. Specifically, I am looking for ways to scale Planning on modern computers. In our lab, we also apply our Planning technology to story planning in games. I was previously a software developer and in the future want to apply AI as an entrepreneur. Only time can tell what I will do afterwards.

A Simple Overview of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is applied not only to robotics, but also corporate decision-making, building large-scale systems, operations research, medicine, computer games and many other fields. If mathematics is the queen of sciences, AI must be the queen of computer sciences. More on this soon ...

My Team's Research on Automated Planning

Automated Planning studies how an intelligent agent can combine actions in order to reach specified goals. An intelligent agent with ability to plan can "think ahead". Automated Planning systems have been used where human involvement is difficult or partial (like space missions, elderly assistance), or problems are quite complex (like composition of web-services) or little time is available before execution (like computer gaming, emergency evacuation). While previously most researchers studied planning for simplified toy problems, nowadays many researchers study how planning can be used in the real world. In our lab, we are building a real-time, responsive AI Planning system (see: What is Planning?) affectionately called Crackpot. Our lab is headed by my supervisor Alexander Nareyek. Another team in our lab will use Crackpot for automated experience/story generation for games/training.

My Research

Modern computers are different from computers in the 20th century. They implement a large degree of parallelism; the parallelism is increasing every year. Software systems must be designed and implemented differently to run on these parallel computers. We study how real-time AI Planning can be implemented to effectively utilize the resources of these parallel computers.

Some Ideas on Entrepreurship

AI is much more in the books and labs than in the real-world applications. Decision Support, Case-Based Reasoning and Expert Systems have been widely used previously. However, planning and scheduling are largely unexplored areas till now.

Some Ideas to Stumble Upon Further in the Future

Agent-Based Simulations looks quite interesting. Large scale simulations of human/human-like agent communities can be carried out for purposes of hypothesis testing and prediction.

Hi!

[Please Note: This blog is no longer updated. Please visit www.cattywumpus.in for updated articles.]

Amit Kumar

PhD Student
Interactive Intelligence Lab
Electrical and Computer Engineering
National University of Singapore

email: amit_kumar at nus dot edu.sg

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Welcome to my page. I intend to post most of my research-related work here. All the entries on this site are always under construction.