Lars Otten
| Position: | Graduate student |
| Email: |  (GPG key) |
| Office: | 4099 Bren Hall |
| Address: | Department of Computer Science University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3435 |
I am working in Rina Dechter's group, I started my studies towards a Ph.D. in the School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in the fall of 2006.
Research
My area of concentration is artificial intelligence, where I am trying to exploit structure in problem solving. The reasoning tasks I deal with can typically be expressed as graphical models and comprise constraint satisfaction and optimization problems as well as queries over Bayesian belief networks (e.g., P(e), MPE, belief updating).
My research circles around the two central approaches of inference (variable elimination) vs. conditioning (search). Currently I am investigating automatically generated heuristics for search. I have also been looking at different complexity measures for reasoning problems represented as graphical models and how to bound instance-based complexity in the presence of determinism. More recently our group has started applying our techniques to problems originating in human genetics.
Our research group recently launched a website where we make available implementations of the algorithms we develop: http://graphmod.ics.uci.edu/.
Personal
Before coming to UCI I was a student at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The best way to get in touch with me is via email at . For encrypted email,
you can obtain the respective GnuPG key from a key server (here for instance), its ID is
830EB280 with the following fingerprint:
869A 685A 0951 E946 92C0 8C7F A9A6 C83A 830E B280.
Finally, for the curious, here is a link to my (non-academic) personal webpage.
Conference Publications
- Bounding Search Space Size via (Hyper)tree Decompositions, Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Proceedings of UAI'08, Helsinki, Finland, July 2008.
- Randomization in Constraint Programming for Airline Planning, Lars Otten, Mattias Grönkvist, and Devdatt Dubhashi. In Proceedings of CP'06, Nantes, France, September 2006. [LNCS link]
Workshops
- Bounding Graphical Models Processing by Hypertree Width, Lars Otten and Rina Dechter. In Doctoral Programme of CP07, Providence, RI, USA, September 2007.