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Of Mousetraps and Men: A Cautionary Tale
Colloquium
- Speaker(s)
- Dr. Matthew L. Ginsberg
- Date
- Thursday, February 21, 2013
- Time
- 4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
- Location
- Galileo Pryne
This talk consists of two interwoven stories. The Happy Story presents a technical solution to the problem of optimizing for cost instead of the more normal metric of duration. We describe a mechanism whereby the optimization problem is split into an evaluation component, where the projected cost of a schedule is evaluated using dynamic programming techniques, and a search component, where search is conducted in “window space” to find a cost-efficient schedule. The Sad Story explains what happens when you build a better mousetrap. The people beating a path to your door are the fat cats, who are reimbursed for their mouse catching on a cost-plus basis.
Biography
Matthew L. Ginsberg received his doctorate in mathematics from Oxford in 1980 at the age of 24. He remained on the faculty in Oxford until 1983, doing research in mathematical physics and computer science; during this period, he wrote a program that was used successfully to trade stock and stock options on Wall Street.
Ginsberg’s continuing interest in artificial intelligence brought him to Stanford in late 1983, where he remained for nine years. He then went on to found CIRL, the computational intelligence research laboratory at the University of Oregon, which he directed until 1996. He remained at CIRL until 1998, when CIRL spun off On Time Systems, a commercial entity focusing on scheduling and routing technology. Ginsberg has been the CEO of the company since its formation and is currently its chairman as well.
Ginsberg is also the chairman and CEO of Green Driver, Inc., a sister company to On Time Systems that focuses on using real-time traffic and signal information to improve driver safety, fuel efficiency, and the driving experience generally.
Ginsberg’s present research interests focus on constraint satisfaction. He is the author of numerous publications in this areas, the editor of “Readings in Nonmonotonic Reasoning,” and the author of “Essentials of Artificial Intelligence,” both published by Morgan Kaufmann. He is also the author of the bridge-playing program GIB, which made international news by finishing 12th in the world bridge championships in Lille, France, and the author of Dr.Fill, a crossword-solving program that made national news by participating in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in March of 2012.