Mikhail Soutchanski Email: mes (at) cs (dot) ryerson (dot) ca (Warning: sometimes email may not reach my mailbox due to spam filters. You might wish to resend your email from another address, if there is no reply.) Office: 245 Church Street, room 275 Phone: (416) 979 5000 ext 7954 Fax: (416) 979-5064 Mailing address: 245 Church Street, ENG281 Department of Computer Science Ryerson University Toronto, Ontario, M5B 2K3, Canada

Teaching    

Winter 2012:
CP8314 (Advanced AI) / CPS841:     Dynamic Systems in Artificial Intelligence
A graduate / advanced undergraduate course.

Fall 2011:
CPS 721:   Artificial Intelligence  , an undergraduate course.
CPS 40A/B:   Undergraduate Thesis  , a two-term course.
CP8310:   Directed Studies in Computer Science,   a graduate course.

Past courses:
CPS841/CP8309:   Foundations of Semantic Technologies   (Winter 2011), an undergraduate/graduate course.
CPS 616:   Analysis of algorithms   (Winter 2011), an undergraduate course.
CP8201:   Computability and Logic   (Fall 2009), a graduate course.
CPS 305: Data Structures     (Fall 2005).
CPS 720.   Selected Topics in Artificial Intelligence   (Fall, 2005).
CPS 530: Component and Network Programming with Java     (Fall 2003).

Research interests

• Artificial Intelligence: in particular, I'm interested in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning.
• Reasoning about actions and events in space and time. Recently, my work concentrates on developing modular and taxonomic representations that can facilitate implementing large-scale logical theories for reasoning about effects of actions/events. These representations have to guarantee decidability and, when possible, computational efficiency of this reasoning. In particular, I explore representations based on modern semantic technologies. One of the tasks here is to reason about a sequence of actions/events when their participants and properties of interests are characterized using terms defined in ontologies. The meaning of these terms is static and does not change after executing actions, but actions can have effects on dynamic properties of an application domain.
• Logic-based high-level programming languages with applications to design of complex controllers for software agents and mobile robots. A Prolog interface to Sony's AIBO robots. Execution Monitoring of high-level programs. Logical formalizations of common-sense reasoning with applications to high-level robot control.
• Markov Decision Processes with constraints: Decision-Theoretic Golog and its applications.

Some of my publications

Robotics Experience

• Hardware: I worked in the end of 1990s with a B21 robot manufactured by RWI. The control of low-level functions was provided by the BeeSoft software developed by the team from the Institute of Computer Science III at the University of Bonn for another B21 robot (called Rhino). A modern open-source version of this software is known as CARMEN Robot Navigation Toolkit.
• The high-level control was implemented in Prolog using ECLiPSe, the ECRC constraint logic programming system. It has been developed by a team from IC-Parc at Imperial College, London, UK (and previously at the European Community Research Center). Currently, it is available from this Web page.

WWW links

• Cognitive Robotics Group at the University of Toronto.
• Graduate Program in Computer Science and Engineering, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I'm an Adjunct Professor supervising graduate students. This brief brochure provides some details about this graduate program.
• Mathematical logic around the world
• External links to robotics pages.

Web login

Web mail

UofT CSlab Web mail

UofT CSlab remote access.