In late 2001, my research group initiated a project for the US Army to explore the integration of intelligent agents, security protocols, and mobile ad-hoc wireless networks (MANETs). The resulting Secure Wireless Agent Testbed became the basis for over a dozen follow-on projects that theoretically or empirically (often both) examined phenomena that appear when building decision making algorithms in environments where communications is not guaranteed or free. Where prior work assumed the communications fabric to be ubiquitous and perfect, our research explored real-world issues that create havoc for traditional distributed AI algorithms and developed techniques to mitigate these issues. The technical insights we produced were highly multi-disciplinary, including numerous publications in both AI and networking venues. This talk will introduce some of the key ideas from this work and present two of them in detail: distributed constraint reasoning and the development semantics for content-based networks.
William Regli is Professor of Computer and Information Science at Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics, with affiliate appointments in several other departments (Biomedical, Mechanical, and Electrical and Computer Engineering). His research spans several computer science and engineering fields, including artificial intelligence, modeling and graphics, wireless networking, tissue engineering, and design and manufacturing. His research has seen diverse sponsorship (Army, DISA, NSF, ONR, NRL, AFOSR, ARO, DARPA, NIST, NIJ/DoJ, FAA) and supported over 200 students, producing over 250 technical publications and 5 seminal patents in the areas of 3D/CAD search.
Regli's recent leadership roles include coordinator of the science communities of practice in the DataNet Federation Consortium, an NSF center creating national-scale infrastructure for data stewardship; and senior science adviser to the Defense Programs Office in the National Nuclear Security Administration of the US Department of Energy. Presently, he is on leave from his university position and serves as Special Assistant to the Director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). From September 2014 till July 2017 he served as Deputy Director and then Acting Director of the Defense Sciences Office, where he managed a portfolio of dozens of projects across basic sciences and engineering disciplines.
Regli received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1995. He has been an NSF CAREER Awardee (1997), and a past Fellow under the National Research Council (1996-1997) and Fulbright Specialist Program (2010-2014). He is an elected IEEE Fellow.