The Collaborative Intelligent Systems Laboratory is engaged in research and development leading to soft-computing systems that operate in distributed environments. These systems—composed of loosely connected computational units, or agents—collect, exchange, and process information to regulate and control system behavior. Included also under the same rubric are systems where the need to facilitate interaction and collaboration of a distributed user community requires the development and implementation of concepts, tools, techniques to facilitate access and analysis of vast, typically distributed, information repositories.

Multiagent intelligent systems of interest to this laboratory include teams of autonomous robots that, often interacting with humans, implement organizational architectures (either imposed externally or generated by the system itself), coordinate their actions, and regulate the behavior of the underlying system. We are also interested in distributed sensor networks where ensembles of geographically dispersed, possibly heterogeneous, sensors collaborate to monitor the state of the operational environment. Important examples of this class of systems are ubiquitous, pervasive, computing systems where sensors and actuators monitor and control the functioning of a wide variety of environmental subsystems (e.g., ambient intelligence).

Our group is also concerned with systems that serve a vast community of users of a computer network providing aids, tools, and mechanisms to facilitate their interaction and organization. In these systems, intelligent techniques adaptively organize data and user communities, collect and examine information about information exchanges in user and social networks and implement mechanisms that promote successful interaction. We are particularly interested in developments stemming from insights from a number of perspectives, notably biology, cognitive science, linguistics, economics, and social sciences.

From a conceptual/theoretical perspective we are engaged in the study of basic issues in collaborative systems such as the value of information, system organization, the notions of similarity and preference, and the concepts of behavior and behavior integration. From an application perspective we emphasize the treatment of paradigmatic problems in the area of collaborative intelligent systems to gain insights applicable to a wide class of applications.

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