I am currently a graduate student and Research Assistant for the Resource Bounded Reasoning laboratory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.   I graduated from Cornell University in 1998 with a double major in Computer Science and (cognitive) Psychology. I wanted to work on problems of Artificial Intelligence.  

But first I got offered my dream job. From 1998-2006, I worked for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, first as Assistant Staff and then as Associate Staff. I designed and built realtime systems that would display, transfer, and record data in the best way possible. It wasn't quite industry, and it wasn't quite academia. We were our own customer. LL was an amazing place, I learned about realtime programming, I learned more about software/hardware interaction than I thought I ever would, I learned how to assess both vendor claims and scientific claims, and I learned that the software and hardware architecture decisions you make now will affect you for years. I also learned not to buy coffee with $20 bills.

Although it wasn't part of my day to day activities during that period, I still remained interested in AI. I felt, and I still feel, that the field is ready to turn a corner. So I applied to the Lincoln Scholar's Program to get formal coursework. Through that,  I received a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Tufts University in 2005.  My advisor was the late Jim Schmolze.  

In Fall 2006 I started at UMass. In my first year at UMass, I worked on the DARPA Coordinators competition for the Honeywell team.  Currently I am researching methods of solving more complicated instances of DEC-POMDP problems.  I am currently TA for CMPSCI 683, Artificial Intelligence.  My advisor is Professor Shlomo Zilberstein.

Publications (preliminary list):

Alan Carlin, James G. Schmolze, Tamara Babaian. "Graphplan Based Conformant Planning with Limited Quantification," Research on Computing Science, vol. 16 Advances in Artificial Intelligence Theory,  65-75, 2005.

Bounded Dynamic Programming for Decentralized POMDPs. Christopher Amato, Alan Carlin and Shlomo Zilberstein. Proceedings of the Workshop on Multi-Agent Sequential Decision Making in Uncertain Domains (MSDM). Held in conjunction with the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-07) , Honolulu, Hawai'i, May, 2007.

Value-Based Observation Compression for DEC-POMDPs. Alan Carlin, Shlomo Zilberstein To appear in AAMAS 2008. pdf

Talks:  

PSIGRAPH:  A Psiform Based Conformant Graphplan.  Alan Carlin, presented at NESCAI 2006.