Associate Professor Maurice Pagnucco

Research Expertise
Dr Pagnucco is a senior lecturer in Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW. He has published several papers at the major artificial intelligence conferences - IJCAI (5 papers), ECAI (5 papers), AAAI (1 paper), KR (1 paper), TARK (1 paper), PRICAI (2 papers). He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and was Workshop chair at the 7th Pacific Rim Conference for Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-02). Pagnucco’s research to date focuses on the development of programming languages for controlling robots and artificial agents in the area of cognitive robotics. Current advances include, languages like Golog (Levesque et al., 1997, Reiter 2000), CMI (Funge 1999) and 3 APL (Hindriks et al. 1999). These languages have shown promise in their application to symbolic representation in agents. His research expertise is in logic-based artificial intelligence, in particular, in the areas of knowledge representation and reasoning and in reasoning about action and change. He has made contributions to the development of theories that model the way in which reasoning entities maintain beliefs about their environments and how those beliefs change as new information is acquired or actions are performed. In two papers at the prestigious IJCAI conference (1999 and 2001) he has, together with colleagues, given a formal insight into the expressive power of causal knowledge for reasoning about the effects of actions. This work has implications for the design of reasoning systems and deliberative programming languages that can be used for controlling virtual characters.

Qualifications
Ph.D, University of Sydney, 1996
Bachelor of Science (Hons I) University of Sydney, 1991

Current Appointment
Senior Lecturer, The University of New South Wales.

Publications
Significant Publications (1999-2004)
1. Nayak, A.C., Delgrande, J.P., and Pagnucco, M. "Conservative Belief Change." Proceedings of the 19th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-04), 2004. 251-256.
2. Nayak, A.C., Pagnucco, M., and Peppas, P. "Dynamic Belief Revision Operators." Artificial Intelligence. 146.2 (2003): 193-228.
3. Pagnucco, M. and Peppas, P. "Causality and Minimal Change Demystified." Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'01). Seattle, USA, August 2001. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001. 125-130.
4. Jauregui, V., Pagnucco, M. and Foo, N.Y. "A Trajectory Approach to Causality." Studia Logica 67 (2001): 385-401.
5. Shapiro, S., Pagnucco, M., Lesperance, Y., and Levesque, H. J. "Iterated Belief Change in the Situation Calculus." Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'2000). Breckenridge, Colorado, USA. April 2000. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 2000. 527-538.
6. Rott, H. and Pagnucco. M. "Severe Withdrawal (and Recovery)." Journal of Philosophical Logic 28.5 (1999): 501-547.
Career-best Publications
1. Wobcke, W., Pagnucco, M. and Zhang, C. Eds. "Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Formalism, Methodologies, and Applications, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence." Volume 1441. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1998.
2. Foo, N. Y., Nayak, A.C., and Pagnucco, M. "Definitional Constraints." Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Artificia Intelligence (ECAI96). Budapest, Hungry, August 1996. Ed. W. Wahlster. 1996. 65 - 69.
3. Nayak, A.C., Foo, N.Y., Pagnucco, M., and Sattar, A. "Changing Conditional Beliefs Unconditionally." Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Theoretical Aspects Of Rationality And Knowledge (TARK VI), De Zeeuwse Stromen, The Netherlands, March 1996. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1996. 119 - 135.
4. Shapiro, S. and Pagnucco, M. "Iterated Belief Change and Exogenous Actions in the Situation Calculus." Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-04). Eds. R. López de Mántaras and L. Saitta. Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2004. 878-882.