Eyal Amir's Curriculum Vitae

Computer Science Department, Siebel Center 3314
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61820
(217)333-8756, eyal@cs.uiuc.edu
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/~eyal

Research Interests

Artificial Intelligence in general and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in particular. I am mostly interested in building applied systems that make use of explicit knowledge in devising their actions, absorb knowledge from their environment (either by learning, diagnosing or receiving knowledge by interaction) and are autonomous. I have worked recently on Commonsense-Knowledge Representations and Reasoning (incl. Theories of Action), Automated Logical Reasoning and AI Architectures. I am also interested in the applications of Logical Reasoning to Planning and Learning, Elaboration Tolerance of logical theories, Belief Revision, Abstraction, Reformulation, the integration of multiple representational and reasoning paradigms, and Human-Level AI.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Stanford University, 1995-2001.
Dissertation: Dividing and conquering logic
Advisor: Professor John McCarthy
M.Sc. Mathematics & Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, 1990-1994.
Dissertation: Souslin Absoluteness, Uniformization and Regularity Properties of Projective Sets
Advisor: Professor Haim Juda
B.Sc. Mathematics & Computer Science, cum laude, Bar-Ilan University, 1987-1992.

Employment History

October 2001 -- Present:
Postdoctoral Researcher, Computer Science Division, University of California at Berkeley. Research conducted under the supervision of Stuart Russell.
October 1995 -- September 2001:
Research and Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. Teaching included CS323 (Nonmonotonic Reasoning) and CS121 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence). Research conducted under the supervision of John McCarthy.
August 1990 -- July 1995:
Captain, Israel Defense Forces, Programming in C++ in a UNIX/X environment.
October 1988 -- June 1992:
Teaching Assistant and Teacher, Bar-Ilan University. Teaching included TA-ing the undergraduate-level classes Introduction to Set Theory and Analysis (a year-long course) and Applications of Computers in the Humanities (a year-long course).

Awards and Honors

Best Thesis award, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 2001/2.
Bar-Ilan University MS Scholarship 1992/93.
Scitex Foundation Scholarship 1991/92.
Bar-Ilan University Computer Science Department Scholarship 1990/91.
Wolf Foundation Scholarship 1990/91.

Professional Activities

Colloquium coordinator:

AI-Vision-Robotics/CIS seminar, University of California, Berkeley, October 2001 to today.
AI-Vision-Robotics division colloquium, Stanford University, March 1998 to June 1999.
Program Committee and Reviews:
- IJCAI-2003 reviewer.
- Commonsense-2003 program committee member.
- CogRob-2002 program committee member.
- NMR-2002 program committee member.
- Commonsense-2001 program committee member.
- NMR-2000 program committee member.
- AAA-2000 reviewer.
- IJCAI-99 reviewer.
Professional organizations:
American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

List of Papers

Theses

E. Amir, Dividing and Conquering Logic, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, Computer Science Department, 2001 (Postscript, PDF).

E. Amir, Souslin Absoluteness, Uniformization and Regularity Properties of Projective Sets, Ms.C. Thesis, Bar Ilan University, Mathematics and Computer Science Department, 2001 (Postscript, PDF).

Journal Papers

E. Amir, Interpolation theorems for nonmonotonic reasoning systems, (submitted for publication), 2002.

E. Amir and S. McIlraith, Strategies for Focusing Structure-Based Theorem Proving, (submitted for publication), 2001.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Logic-Based Subsumption Architecture, Artificial Intelligence journal, accepted for publication, 2003.

E. Amir and S. McIlraith, Partition-Based Logical Reasoning for First-Order and Propositional Theories, Artificial Intelligence journal, accepted for publication, 2003.

Eyal Amir, Object-Oriented First-Order Logic, Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI), 3, Section C, 1999.

Conference Papers

E. Amir and S. Russell, Logical Filtering, to appear in 18th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'03), 2003.

E. Amir and B. Engelhardt, Factored Planning, to appear in 18th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'03), 2003.

B. MacCartney, S. McIlraith, E. Amir, and T. E. Uribe Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases, to appear in 18th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'03), 2003.

E. Amir, R. Krauthgamer, and S. Rao Constant Factor Approximation of Vertex-Cuts in Planar Graphs, to appear in 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC'03), 2003.

E. Amir, Interpolation theorems for nonmonotonic reasoning systems, 8th European conference on logics in artificial intelligence (JELIA'02), 2002.

E. Amir, Projection in Decomposed Situation Calculus, 8th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'2002), 2002.

S. McIlraith and E. Amir, Theorem proving with structured theories, 17th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'01), 2001.

Eyal Amir, Efficient Approximation for Triangulation of Minimum Treewidth, 17th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI '01), 2001.

Eyal Amir, (De)Composition of Situation Calculus Theories, Seventeenth Natl' Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'2000), 2000.

Eyal Amir and Sheila McIlraith, Improving the Efficiency of Reasoning Through Structure-Based Reformulation, Proceedings of the 4th Intl' Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA'00), Horseshoe Bay, Texas, 2000. B.Y. Choueiry and T. Walsh Eds., Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1864. Springer.

Eyal Amir and Sheila McIlraith, Partition-Based Logical Reasoning, 7th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'2000), 2000.

Eyal Amir and Pedrito Maynard-Reid II, Logic-based Subsumption Architecture, 16th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'99), 1999. See also the project web page.

Eyal Amir, Pointwise Circumscription Revisited, in Sixth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'98), Trento, Italy 1998.

Book Chapters

Eyal Amir, Towards a Formalization of Elaboration Tolerance: Adding and Deleting Axioms, in Frontiers of Belief Revision, M. Williams and H. Rott eds., Kluwer, 2000.

Eyal Amir, Souslin Absoluteness, Uniformization and Regularity Properties of Projective Sets, in Contributors, BEST conference proceedings, edited by T. Bartoszynski and M. Scheepers, 1996.

Refereed Workshop Papers

E. Amir and P. Doyle, Adventure games: a challenge for cognitive robotics, AAAI'02 workshop on Cognitive Robotics, 2002.

E. Amir, Planning with nondeterministic actions and sensing, AAAI'02 workshop on Cognitive Robotics, 2002.

E. Amir and S. McIlraith, Solving Satisfiability using Decomposition and the Most Constrained Subproblem, LICS workshop on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2001), 2001. Proceedings of SAT 2001 appear in Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics (Elsevier Science). Also in IJCAI'01 workshop on Distributed Constraint Reasoning

S. McIlraith and E. Amir, Theorem Proving with Structured Theories (Preliminary Report), LICS workshop on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2001), 2001. Proceedings of SAT 2001 appear in Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics (Elsevier Science). Also appeared in Fifth Symposium on the logical formalization of commonsense reasoning, 2001.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, LiSA: A Robot Driven by Logical Subsumption, Fifth Symposium on the logical formalization of commonsense reasoning, 2001.

S. C. Shapiro, E. Amir, H. Grosskreutz, D. Randell, and M. Soutchanski, Commonsense and Embodied Agents: A Panel Discussion, Fifth Symposium on the logical formalization of commonsense reasoning, 2001.

E. Amir and P. Maynard-Reid II, Logic-Based Subsumption Architecture: Empirical Evaluation, AAAI Fall Symposium on Parallel Architectures for Cognition, 2000.

Eyal Amir, Object-Oriented First-Order Logic, Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action, and Change (NRAC'99), Stockholm, Sweden. August, 1999.

Eyal Amir and Pedrito Maynard-Reid, Logic-based Subsumption Architecture, AAAI 1998 Fall Symposium on Cognitive Robotics, Orlando, Florida. October 1998.

Eyal Amir, Towards a Formalization of Elaboration Tolerance: Adding and Deleting Axioms, Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation (SARA98), Pacific Grove, California 1998. Also appeared in Seventh International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning (Belief Revision track), Trento, Italy. May 1998.

Eyal Amir, Point-Sensitive Circumscription, Fourth Symposium on the Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, London, England 1998.

Eyal Amir, Machinery for Elaborating Action -- Preliminary Report, Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action, and Change, Nagoya, Japan 1997.

Eyal Amir, Formalizing Action Using Pointwise Circumscription and Set Theory, Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action, and Change, Nagoya, Japan 1997.

Refereed Abstracts and Posters

E. Amir, Elaboration Tolerance of Logical Theories, Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'99), Doctoral Consortium, 1999.

E. Amir, Formalizing Action Using Set Theory and Modified Pointwise Circumscription (Poster), 15th Intl' Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'97), 1997.

E. Amir, Applications of Context to Elaboration Tolerance (Abstract), Working Papers of the AAAI Fall Symposium on Context in Knowledge Representation and Natural Language, 1997.

eyala@cs.stanford.edu