M. Afzal Upal

** ********** **,

Ottawa Hills, OH

Phone: 416-***-****

Email: abg2n3@r.postjobfree.com

Education

Ph.D. (Computer Science)

MSc. (Computer Science)

B.Sc. (Computer Science)

University of Alberta, Edmonton

Thesis: Learning to improve plan quality.

Supervisor: Dr. Renee' Elio

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

Thesis: Monte Carlo Comparison of Non-hierarchical unsupervised classifiers

Supervisor: Dr. Eric Neufeld

University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon

2000

1996

1994

Professional Appointments

Computer Scientist

Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor

Computer Scientist

Assistant Professor

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Software Engineer

Defence R&D Canada, Toronto

Occidental College (oxy.edu), Los Angeles, CA

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of

Toledo (utoledo.edu)

Information Extraction and Transport Inc. (iet.com) Arlington, VA

Faculty of Computer Science

Dalhousie University (dal.ca), Halifax, Canada

Department of Computing Science

University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Product Direct Network, Saskatoon, Canada

8/2008 to present

6/2007 to 4/2009

7/2003 to 5/2007

3/2001 to 12/2002

7/1999 to 3/2001

9/1995 to 6/1994

1/1995 to 8/1995

6. Courses Taught

Occidental College, Cognitive Science Program

COGS 295: Topics in Cognitive Science (Spring 2008)

COGS 110: Models of Cognition (Spring 2008)

Cultural Studies Program Section 28: Computation, Cognition, & Culture

(Fall 2007)

COGS 101: Introduction to Cognitive Science (Fall 2007, Spring 2008)

University of Toledo Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS)

Department

EECS 1570: Linear Data Structures (Spring 2006)

EECS 1580: Non-linear Data Structures (Spring 2007)

EECS 2100: Computer Organization and Assembly Language Programming (Fall

2003, Fall 2004, Fall 2005, Fall 2006)

EECS 4000: Senior Design (Spring 2005)

EECS 4580/5580/7580: Survey of Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2004)

EECS 4740/5740: Advanced Artificial Intelligence (Spring 2006, Spring 2007)

EECS 5930: Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Graduate Seminar (Fall

2006)

Dalhousie University Faculty of Computer Science (CSCI)

CSCI 3134: Functional & Logic Programming (Spring 2000, Summer 2000)

CSCI 3136: Principles of Programming Languages (Spring 2000, Summer 2000,

Fall 2000)

CSCI 4163: Human Computer Interaction (Fall 1999)

CSCI 6504: Advanced Topics in Software Agents (Fall 2000)

University of Saskatchewan Department of Computer Science

CMPT 100: Introduction to Computer Science for non-majors (Winter 1995)

7. Programming Experience

7.1 Information Extraction & Transport (IET) Inc. Projects

Ultra*Log: As a part of this DARPA sponsored project, the IET team

working under my leadership

successfully extended the world's largest agent-based planning, execution,

and replanning system.

Automating military logistics is a challenging planning problem because of

(a) the millions of different

object types and thousands of heterogeneous interacting organizational

units involved, (b) the complex

continual interplay between planning, execution, and replanning, and (c)

stringent performance

requirements. Instead of focusing on traditional domain independent AI

planning techniques, DARPA's

Advanced Logistics Planning Project (ALP) modeled the military units

involved in military logistics

planning using the agent-based computing approach known as Cogntive Agent

Architecture or Cougaar1

for short. Cougaar is able to compute a detailed Level 5 military logistics

plan given an Oplan within an

hour. One of the major limitations of earlier versions of Cougaar was its

inability to allow military

commanders to pose what-if queries (such as, "what would happen if these

vehicles were flown and not

driven") and compute alternative course(s) of action for the hypothetical

scenarios while retaining the

original course of action for comparison. It also did not dynamically

evaluate the effect of a change in

the state of the world on the quality of a plan. As the leader of IET's

Ultra*Log project team, I extended

the basic Cougaar architecture to (a) allow Cougaar users to pose what-if

queries (Upal 2003), (b) be able

to see the resulting alternative plans, (c) be able to determine the

probability of success and failure of

each plan, and (d) tradeoff the alternatives in a decision theoretic

framework (Upal & Fung 2003). Time

efficiency was our primary design concern followed by space efficiency.

Because of time efficiency,

designing a probabilistic reasoning solution that would allow probabilistic

information about chances of

success/failure of each plan to be propagated from the lowest level agents

to higher level agents was a

key challenge. I designed a message passing version of Judea Pearl's

polytree algorithm that conformed

to Ultra*Log architectural principles of asynchrony and distributed

processing. Space efficiency

concerns demanded a conservative approach towards copying Cougaar objects

for creating alternative

versions of "reality" for processing what-if queries. I designed an

approach called "internal-delta" which

only copied an object to a modified world when that object had to be

modified in the new world (Upal

2003). Otherwise, the objects from the unchanged world were allowed to be

inherited by the changed

what-if worlds. Our evaluation indicated that this approach was successful

in saving space in most

Ultra*Log planning scenarios (Upal & Fung 2003).

EELD: As part of DARPA's Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery project,

I led the design and

development of automated software for measuring the performance of link

discovery systems. The link

discovery task is different from traditional data-mining and classification

tasks which involve analyzing

data to discover and represent associations based on the aggregate

statistical characteristics of a sample

of instances drawn from some population. The link discovery task begins

with such association patterns

and sifts through various databases to find instances of a given pattern. I

analyzed similarities between

classification and the link discovery to design metrics for measuring the

performance of link discovery

systems. The link discovery system evaluation software that I implemented

was used to evaluate the

performance of link discovery systems being developed under the EELD

program.

RKF: As a member of DARPA's Rapid Knowledge Formation project I designed

challenge problems to

challenge the state of the art in knowledge acquisition.

7.2 Product Direct Network Projects

OPAL: OPAL was one of web's first electronic auction environments that

allowed companies in

Canada's oil patch to trade surplus equipment. An Informix SQL database

formed the backend of the

system. My job involved maintaining the Apache web-server and design and

develop software in

programming in Informix 4GL and Perl to build common gateway interfaces

(CGI).

3

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