Mark H. Burstein

Education

  • Ph.D. (Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence), Yale University, 1984.
  • M.S. (Computer Science), Yale University, 1979.
  • B.S. (Mathematics), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976.

Memberships

AAAI, IEEE, Associate Member of Sigma Xi,
The Scientific Research Society of North America (M.I.T. chapter).

Experience

Dr. Mark Burstein is a Principal Scientist and leader of the AI and Machine Learning Group in BBN's Information and Knowledge Technologies Business Unit. The team is a group of roughly 35 people that includes scientists in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Human Factors, Intelligent Training Systems, and interactive planning and scheduling systems.

Mark's research interests include reflective multi-strategy approaches to learning, especially for planning and action, automated and mixed-initiative planning and scheduling techniques, mixed-initiative control of agent organizations, cognitive approaches to machine learning, models of human memory organization and retrieval, and cognitive models of plausible, analogical and qualitative reasoning. He has a long list of published papers, articles and book chapters.

Mark is currently Principal Investigator on the DARPA Integrated Learning Program's POIROT project, where he is coordinating the efforts of fourteen university and industrial research teams to develop a system that can learn hierarchical task procedures or 'workflows' from observations of semantic web service traces.

Mark was a founding member of the OWL-S Coalition, a group of researchers from across the country that worked together to develop OWL-S (OWL for Services), a semantic web ontology and methodology for dynamic utilization of web services. He designed many key aspects of the OWL-S model. (See publications on Semantic Web Services.)

Mark also co-chaired and was the primary organizer of the Semantic Web Service Initiative's Architecture Committee (SWSA), an international group of researchers within the Semantic Web Services Initiative (SWSI) that was chartered to develop an architectural model for web services that can dynamically interoperate with software clients based on published semantic representations of their functionality. He was primary author and editor of the committee report.

He has published well over fifty papers, chapters and journal articles. Selected Publications by Topic. His research interests are in the areas of (with links to publications):

Since joining BBN in 1984, Mark has been the Principal Investigator and/or technical leader on a large variety of research projects. More details

Past projects include:

  • Automatic Tools for Mappings Between Ontologies (DARPA DAML Program, 2000-2005) - co-PI with Prof. Drew McDermott at Yale University
  • Mixed-Initiative Control of Autonomous Unmanned Units under Uncertainty (DARPA MICA Program, 2001-2003)- co-PI with Dr. David Diller at BBN, Prof. Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University and Prof. Geoff Gordon at CMU
  • Team Leader: Mixed-Initiative Agent Team Management and Evaluation (DARPA CoABS Program 1998-2003) - PI and leader of MIATA, a group of ten research projects, whose focus was on mixed-initiative control of agent systems.
  • Mission Planning System (MPS 1996-2003) - with Dr. Doug Smith at Kestrel Institute - a mixed-initiative scheduling system developed for the US Air Mobility Commannd
  • Airlift Scheduling Tools (AFRL- Rome Site) 1994-1998 with Doug Smith at Kestrel and Dr. Stephen F. Smith at CMU Robotics Institute.
  • ARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative (ARPI, 1990-1994) - Technical Leader of this DARPA Program's BBN-led integration team.
  • Large-Scale Knowledge Acquisition Tools (DARPA's Strategic Computing Program) (1985-1988)
  • Modeling Human Plausible Reasoning (ARL 1984-1988) - co-PI with Dr. Allan Collins