Invited Speaker---Associate Prof. Shieu-Hong Lin


Mathematics / Computer Science Department, Biola University

Biography: Dr. Shieu-Hong Lin received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University in 1997 and is a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Biola University, Los Angeles, USA. His research interests include algorithms, artificial intelligence, automatic reasoning and formal verification, combinatorial optimization, data mining and machine learning. He has published many articles in journals and conference proceedings in these research areas.

Speech Title: Automatic Verification of Event Sequences with Temporal and Causal Information
Abstract: Business workflows and industrial processes often require multi-agent collaboration in a distributed environment. When agents take actions, they trigger state-transition events in the system. We can describe the behavior of the agents in terms of the temporal relationships of their actions and the state-transition events triggered by their actions. We model such state-transition events as compact causal rules regarding the statuses of state variables before and after the events. To ensure the security of any given multi-agent distributed environment like this, we need to automatically verify the interactions of the agents to ensure they never trigger an event sequence leading to an undesirable system state. The verification task is essentially a control problem over the underlying non-deterministic discrete dynamic system. In this talk, we describe algorithms and complexity results regarding the verification task for distributed multi-agent systems in various contexts. We show that this computational task can be accomplished effectively in polynomial time in many interesting practical contexts.