Biographical information: Dr. Boddy is an internationally recognized expert in several areas of computer science research, including planning and scheduling, automated reasoning, and constraint satisfaction. During the past seventeen years he has published more that 30 peer-reviewed articles in journals and conference proceedings, presented tutorials on planning, temporal reasoning and constraint-based reasoning at international conferences, and given numerous invited talks. Dr. Boddy continues to play an active role in the research community, serving on program committees and reviewing for national and international conferences, as well as serving as a journal reviewer for Artificial Intelligence Journal, Computational Intelligence, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence, and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He has helped to organize numerous workshops and conferences in related research areas, and served as a program reviewer for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

A CSE Colloquium

Thursday, October 27, 2005.

Refreshments 3:30 p.m., 348 Avery Hall
Talk: 4:00 p.m., 115 Avery Hall

In this talk, I will present the results of a project involving applying classical planning techniques to the problem of analyzing computer network vulnerabilities. Specifically, we are concerned with the generation of "Adversary Courses of Action", which are extended sequences of exploits leading from some initial state to an attacker's goal. In this application, we have demonstrated the generation of attack plans for a simple but realistic web-based document control system, with excellent performance compared to the prevailing state of the art in this area. In addition to the new capabilities gained in the area of vulnerability analysis, this implementation provided some insights into performance and modeling issues for classical planning systems, both specifically with regard to FF and other forward heuristic planners, and more generally for classical planning. I will also discuss some open issues and plans for further work in the area.

Paper on which talk is based: Course of Action Generation for Cyber Security Using Classical Planning, M. Boddy, J. Gohde, T. Haigh. S. Harp. Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-05), 2005.

A lecture at CSCE 421/821

Thursday, October 27, 2005

111 Avery Hall 111.

Slides of talk

Required reading for class: A Method for Global Optimization of Large Systems of Quadratic Constraints. N. Lamba, M. Dietz, D.P. Johnson, and M.S. Boddy. Second International Workshop on Global Constraint Optimization and Constraint Satisfaction 2003 (COCOS 03). Pages 61-70.

Recommended reading for class: "Constraint-Based Attribute and Interval Planning". Jeremy Frank, Ari K. Jónsson, Journal of Constraints, Special Issue on Constraints and Planning. Pages 335-338. Vol. 8 no 4, 2003. (Available from library at Avery Hall)