Speaker: Dr. Alan Mackworth Title: Designing Constraint-Based Agents In order to thrive, an agent must satisfy dynamic constraints deriving from four sources: its internal structure, its goals and preferences, its external environment and the coupling between its internal and external worlds. The life of any agent who acts without respecting those constraints will be out of balance. Based on this view of agents, I shall give four perspectives on the theme of designing constraint-based agents. The first is a discussion of the evolution of the concept of constraints in intelligent systems, from static to dynamic constraints. Second, I'll present our theory of constraint-based agent design and a corresponding experiment in robot architecture. Third, I shall sketch our work on the design of two assistive technology prototypes for people with physical and mental disabilities, who are living with significant additional constraints. Finally, our collective failure to recognize and satisfy with various constraints could explain why many of the worlds we live in seem to be so out of kilter. This approach hints at ways to restore the balance. Some of the work discussed is joint with Jim Little, Alex Mihailidis, Pinar Muyan-Ozcelik, Robert St-Aubin, Pooja Viswanathan, Suling Yang, and Ying Zhang. Biography Alan Mackworth is a Professor of Computer Science and Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of British Columbia. He was educated at Toronto (B.A.Sc.), Harvard (A.M.) and Sussex (D.Phil.). He works on constraint-based artificial intelligence with applications in vision, robotics, situated agents, assistive technology and sustainability. He is known for his work in constraint satisfaction, robot soccer, hybrid systems and constraint-based agents. He has authored over 100 papers and co-authored two books: Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach (1998) and Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents (2010). He served as the founding Director of the UBC Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. He is a Fellow of AAAI, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Royal Society of Canada.