Amin H. Atrash
Graduate Student
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Email:aatras at cs mcgill ca
Phone:514-398-7071 ext. 00141#
Office:McConnell Room 111S
About: I am currently a PhD student at the School of Computer Science at McGill University. I work under Professor Joelle Pineau as part of the Reasoning and Learning Lab and the Centre for Intelligent Machines.

I received my undergraduate degree in computer science in 1999 and my masters degree in 2002 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2003 to 2005, I worked with the speech recognition group at BBN Technologies.

Resume
Research Statement

Research Summary: My research interests focus on reasoning and learning algorithms and their application to real world domains. In particular, my work focuses on Markov models and their use on robot platforms.
Research Projects: SmartWheeler - The SmartWheeler project takes advantage of advancements in robot technology to develop an autonomous wheelchair for use by disabled patients who might normally have difficultly operating a standard electric wheelchair. Work on this project focuses on development of an intelligent interaction manager to allow the user to control the wheelchair through a multimodal interface, particularly speech. The dialogue management is handled by a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) which determines the correct action, such as issuing a command to the robot, requesting clarification, or returning information to the user. This dialogue management system allows for a more natural interaction with the wheelchair beyond simple voice commands. This project includes construction and maintenance of the robot platform, development of the dialogue management system, and user studies on patients in a rehabilitation center.

POMDP Learning - POMDP research has typically been focused on planning using existing POMDP models. The goal of this project is to use active learning to discover the parameters of the model itself. By requesting information from an oracle which has the optimal desired policy, a POMDP model is refined over time to better approximate the real world. Using data from this oracle, the model can adapt parameters which cause the resulting policy to behave as the oracle.

Previous Projects
Teaching: COMP 526 - Probabilistic AI
Publications:
  • Atrash, A. and J. Pineau., A Bayesian Method for Learning POMDP Observation Parameters for Robot Interaction Management Systems. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. 2010 Submitted

  • Atrash, A., R. Kaplow, J. Villemure, R. West, H. Yamani, J. Pineau. Development and Validation of a Robust Interface for Improved Human-Robot Interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics. 2009. Vol 1. (.pdf)

  • Kaplow, R., A. Atrash, and J. Pineau. Variable Resolution Decomposition for Robotic Navigation Under a POMDP Framework. International Conference on Robotics and Automation. 2010. To appear

  • Atrash, A. and J. Pineau. A Bayesian Reinforcement Learning Approach for Customizing Human-Robot Interfaces. International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. 2009. (.pdf)

  • Pineau, J. and A. Atrash for the SmartWheeler team. SmartWheeler: A robotic wheelchair test-bed for investigating new models of human-robot interaction. AAAI Spring Symposium on Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics. 2007. (.pdf)

  • Pineau J. and A. Atrash Multi-modal control of an intelligent wheelchair. IROS Workshop on Assistive Technologies. 2007 (.pdf)

  • Atrash, A. and J. Pineau. Efficient Planning and Tracking in POMDPs with Large Observation Spaces. AAAI Workshop on Statistical and Empirical Approaches for Spoken Dialogue Systems 2006 (.pdf)

  • S. Abdou, et al. The 2004 BBN Levantine Arabic and Mandarin CTS Transcription Systems. EARS Workshop 2004.

  • Lukowiz, P., J. Ward, H. Junker, M. Stager, G. Troster, A. Atrash, and T. Starner. Recognizing Workshop Activity Using Body Worn Microphones and Accelerometers.. International Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2004.(.pdf)

  • Lukowiz, P., J. Ward, H. Junker, M. Stager, G. Troster, A. Atrash, and T. Starner. Recognizing Workshop Activity Using Body Worn Microphones and Accelerometers. Georgia Tech Technical Report 03-32. (.pdf)

  • Westeyn, T., H. Brashear, A. Atrash, and T. Starner. Georgia Tech Gesture Toolkit: Supporting Experiments in Gesture Recognition. International Conference on Perceptive and Multimodal User Interfaces 2003. (.pdf)

  • Simmons, R., et al. GRACE: An Autonomous Robot for the AAAI Robot Challenge. AAAI Magazine, Summer 2003.(.pdf)

  • Atrash, A. and S. Koenig. Probablistic Planning for Behavior-Based Robotics. FLAIRS, 2001. (.pdf)
Non-academic:
  • For the past 2 years, I have been training in Savate Kickboxing.
  • Some of my recent GPS recordings plotted onto google maps/earth.