Spring 2025 GRASP Seminar: Sarah Keren, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, “Encouraging Autonomous Agents to Behave Nicely”
February 24 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
This will be an in-person event only with attendance in Levine 307.
ABSTRACT
Autonomous AI agents are deployed in increasingly complex and uncertain environments where they must account for the presence of other agents while trying to achieve their own objectives. Moreover, such agents may require assistance from other agents to efficiently accomplish their assigned task or even be able to complete it at all.
This work aims to develop theoretical foundations for agents to learn and adopt cooperative behaviors by introducing Value of Assistance (VOA) – a novel measure of the potential performance improvement achieved by assistive actions. The benefit of using VOA will be demonstrated in multi-robot navigation and collaborative manipulation settings. In addition, adaptations of VOA to other stochastic and partially observable multi-agent settings will be discussed, including our ongoing work on AI-enabled energy systems.
Presenter
Sarah Keren - Learn More
Sarah Keren is a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at The Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology where she leads the Collaborative AI and Robotics (CLAIR) lab (https://clair.cs.technion.ac.il.). Before joining the Technion, Sarah was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She earned her PhD from the Technion.
Sarah’s research focuses on providing theoretical foundations for designing AI systems that are capable of effective collaboration with each other and with people. She has received several awards, including the ICAPS 2020 Best Dissertation Honorable Mention, the ICAPS 2014 Honorable Mention for Best Paper, and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Postdoctoral Award for Women in Mathematical and Computing Sciences. Sarah’s work has been published in leading conferences and journals for AI and robotics, including IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, NeurIPS, AAMAS, JAIR, KR, IROS, and ICRA.