2011 Denison Programming Contest

March 3rd, 2011

This past weekend 3 teams of Oberlin students competed at the 2011 Denison Spring Programming Contest.  18 teams of 3 students each from 9 nearby schools competed trying to solve 6 problems, in 4 hours, with only one computer per team!

Team Foo of Oberlin (Brendan Chambers, Thomas Ramfjord, Danny Spencer) and Team O(bees) (Veronica Colegrove, Emma Conner, Eston Schweickart) each solved 3 problems and Team Oberlin Oriented Programmers (Kaitlyn Price, Kiron Roy, Joaquin Ruales) solved 2.  Much fun was had by all!

2011 Denison Spring Contest

Coordination Strategies for Multi-agent Scheduling

March 1st, 2011

James Boerkoel, Univeristy of Michigan, will present his talk “Coordination Strategies for Multi-agent Scheduling.  Thursday March 3, 2011 4:30 p.m. in King 221 – Refreshments @ 4:00 p.m. in King 223 CSCI Office.

The Simple Temporal Problem (STP) is a popular representation for solving centralized scheduling and planning problems. When scheduling agents are associated with different users who need to coordinate some of their activities, however, considerations such as privacy, autonomy, and scalability suggest solving the joint STP in a more distributed manner. In this talk, I will introduce multi-agent STPs and discuss recent advances in STP algorithms that exploit loosely-coupled problem structure. Building off these advances, I will discuss our distributed approach for solving the multi-agent STP, which includes exchanging summaries of local agent problems and then choosing temporal decoupling points that allow agents to independently manage their local schedules.  I will discuss the advantages of our approach as well as future extensions and applications.