Nathan Schurr

Nathan SchurrHooray! I have sucessfully finished my thesis defense. If you are interested, here is my thesis document.

I have now completed my Ph.D. at the University Of Southern California in the field of Artificial Intelligence. My advisor was Milind Tambe. My interests have primarily been focused on humans collaborating interacting with intelligent entities. My research is listed below. I'm a proud member of Teamcore research group :)

Feel free to contact me at: schurr@usc.edu

Disaster Response

Project Appears in Local News

Our disaster response research project has been featured in both the Daily Breeze newspaper and the local television news. We have videos of the coverage available. See links below to download in Windows Media (WMV) and Quicktime (MP4) formatted files:

  • UPN 13 News. Runtime: 01:57 Download in ASX, WMV and MP4
  • Fox 11 News. Runtime: 00:34 Download in ASX, WMV and MP4

Project Overview

The aim of my research is to enable humans and agents to work together in teams. Agents are becoming sophisticated and more capable of replacing some human team members in real world dynamic situations. The multiagent teams are becoming more complex, larger-scale, and more intelligent. As such they are capable of making more decisions on the team and not just taking commands. Though there is potential for team performance improvement, these new human agent teams introduce a new set of challenges to overcome.

 

DEFACTO research prototype (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence)

Toward these goals, I have constructed a research prototype, called DEFACTO (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence) to implement these approaches. Though DEFACTO can be used for deployed applications, it is initially being used as a modeling and simulation tool to improve on current training methods.

 

DEFACTO research prototype (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence)

This project is funded by the USC Homeland Security Center (CREATE).

People

  • Milind Tambe
  • Nathan Schurr
  • Madhuri Kottamraju

Selected Publications

For a complete list of publications, select he above Publications tab.

Co-authors

  • Emma Bowring
  • Madhuri Kottamraju
  • Janusz Marecki
  • Praveen Paruchuri
  • Jonathan Pearce
  • Milind Tambe
  • Pradeep Varakantham
  • Xiaoming Zheng

Download the PDF version of my CV

Nathan Schurr
PHE 514, University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA, 90089
p:213.740.9560
f:213.740.7877

schurr@usc.edu

Education

  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA - 2007
  • Ph.D. in Computer Science
  • Research Advisor: Professor Milind Tambe
  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA - 2004
  • M.S. in Computer Science
  • California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA - 2002
  • B.S. in Computer Engineering
  • Minor: Philosophy
  • Recognition: Cum Laude

Experience

  • Contributor to the Department of Homeland Security Center: Presented to review committee and now a part of the initial research projects. I am developing tools in an effort to simulate and recover from terrorist attacks.
  • Manager over group of four software developers: All worked on adding functionality and documentation to the Machinetta proxy-based teamwork software package.
  • Teaching Assistant for CSCI 543: Software Multiagent Systems for Spring 2003 Semester.
  • Research Assistant under Milind Tambe for all Semesters.
  • Senior Software Engineer/Co-founder 2000-2001 Terazima LLC in San Luis Obispo, CA. Completed design and Java coding for the Gnutella module. Influenced business decisions and direction of company.
  • Co-Program Manager and Design Lead 2000 CADRC San Luis Obispo, CA. Designed 3D interactive graphics demo for military research
  • Summer Intern at Intel Corporation in Hillsboro, Oregon. 1999. Owned the State Equations for WXB Bridge to the 82460GX chipset

Publications

Select above Publications tab

Honors and Activities

  • Awarded Viterbi School of Engineering Homeland Security Center Doctoral Fellowship
  • Placed on Cal Poly Engineering Dean’s List and President’s List (all quarters)
  • Member of Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society
  • Member of American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • Served on the Board of Directors for College of Engineering for A.S.I. (student govt.)
  • Tutored in a number of different topics in engineering, mathematics and philosophy
  • Performer with Smile and Nod improvisational theater

Presentations

  • Presented to Tom Ridge, then Secretary of Homeland Security
  • Presented to Charles McQueary, then Under Secretary for Science and Technology within the Department of Homeland Security
  • Presented to Dr. John Hennessy, President of Stanford University
  • Invited speaker to York University, UK
  • Invited speaker to the Institute of Creative Technology (ICT)
  • Invited speaker to Advanced Artificial Intelligence course hosted by Sven Koenig

Publicity

  • Interviewed for National Public Radio
  • Featured in Daily Breeze newspaper
  • Research appeared on Fox 11 news
  • Interviewed for and appeared on UPN 13 news

Thesis

Nathan Schurr. Toward Human Mulitagent Teams Defended on October 30, 2007

Conference Papers and Journal Articles

Workshop and Symposia Papers

  • Nathan Schurr, Pradeep Varakantham, Emma Bowring, Milind Tambe, and Barbara Grosz Asimovian Multiagents: Applying Laws of Robotics to Teams of Humans and Agents Programming Multi-Agent Systems Workshop at The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2006
  • Nathan Schurr, Pratik Patil, Fred Pighin, Milind Tambe Lessons Learned from Disaster Management Agent Technology for Disaster Management Workshop at The Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2006
  • Nathan Schurr, Janusz Marecki, Milind Tambe, J. P. Lewis, Nikhil Kasinadhuni The Future of Disaster Response: Humans Working with Multiagent Teams using DEFACTO American Association Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Spring Symposium on "AI Technologies for Homeland Security," 2005
  • Nathan Schurr, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe Coordination Advice: A Preliminary Investigation of Human Advice to Multiagent Teams American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Spring Symposium on Interaction between Humans and Autonomous Systems over Extended Operation 2004
  • Nathan Schurr, Paul Scerri, Milind Tambe. Impact of Human Advice on Agent Teams: A Preliminary Report Proceedings of Workshop on Humans and Multi-Agent Systems at The Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-03), 2003
  • Paul Scerri, Lewis Johnson, David V. Pynadath, Paul Rosenbloom, Nathan Schurr, Mei Si, and Milind Tambe. Getting Robots, Agents and People to Cooperate: An Initial Report American Association Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Spring Symposium on "Human Interaction with Autonomous Systems in Complex Environments," 2003

Book Chapters