To: Mohan Marette who wrote (6990 ) 9/16/1999 11:48:00 AM From: Mohan Marette Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 12475
PeopleWatch- Devika Subramanian: Outstanding! You go girl. A B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur , an M.S. (1984) and Ph.D. (1989) from the Stanford University, Devika Subramanian is the winner of the Outstanding Educator Award, Merrill Presidential Scholar Program, Cornell University, 1991. Her research in artificial intelligence is aimed at the design and analysis of adaptive, discrete, limited-resource agents that perform tasks in dynamics environments. She is interested in four general questions in this area: 1) What are principles for design of bounded agents (both single agent and agent societies)? 2) How can one design agents that optimally trade off deliberation with action? 3) What does it mean to say that a system with limited resources is optimal, and how can one design bounded optimal systems given task class and environment descriptions? and 4) What are methods for constructing learning policies for bounded systems that continuously adapt to their environments? Subramanian approaches these questions using a blend of theory and experimentation. She designs decision procedures with probabilistic performance guarantees for bounded agents and uses them to solve large-scale problems in science and engineering. Subramanian joined the faculty at Rice in July 1995 and has established artificial intelligence as a new area of study. With support from the NSF, she is developing representation techniques and methods for construction of tools for preparametric design of opto-electro-mechanical systems from specifications of behavior. Devika was also the winner of the President of India Gold Medal, Indian Institute of Technology, 1982.