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Michigan Student Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

I founded the Michigan Student Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2008 to make it easy for as many undergraduates to get involved in AI research. MSAIL is a research-based student organization focused on providing real world projects in AI to undergraduates and promoting engagement in scientific research and graduate education.

MSAIL's Website

The website contains some of our upcoming events, forums, and projects pages. It is not updated as often as I would like to though.

MSAIL Projects

One major benefit of being a member of MSAIL is the opportunity to work on research projects related to artificial intelligence. Since 2008, we established four projects that Michigan students can participate in.

I- Robocup

RoboCup is an international initiative that fosters research in robotics and artificial intelligence, on multi-robot systems in particular, through competitions of RoboCup Robot Soccer, RoboCup Rescue, RoboCup@Home, and RoboCupJunior. RoboCup currently includes a number of different robot soccer leagues that focus on different research challenges. The RoboCup Standard Platform League is a RoboCup robot soccer league, in which all teams compete with identical robots. The robots operate fully autonomously, i.e. there is no external control, neither by humans nor by computers. The current standard platform used is the humanoid NAO by Aldebaran Robotics.

from the Standard Platform League website

The Michigan RoboCup Team has four main purposes:

  1. To give young engineers the chance to apply skills learned in engineering classes to difficult real world scenarios.
  2. To improve students' problem solving skills by tackling non-trivial engineering problems prevalent in the field of robotics.
  3. To let young engineers learn techniques and programming skills that would not otherwise be learned.
  4. To rank in the top three of the RobotStadium.org online match.

II- Trading Agents Competition: Ad Auctions (TAC:AA)

TAC/AA, or Trading Agent Competition/Ad Auctions, is a competition in which autonomous bidding agents compete against each other in simulated ad auctions. Ad auctions are an incredibly hot research topic right now and are used by companies such as Google and Yahoo to make tens of billions of dollars a year. This competition is a great way to learn about economics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

This project is centered around intra-team competition by student agents. We hope to field a team agent for the 2010 TAC/AA competition in July.

The TAC/AA project is led by Adam Kidder. Our faculty advisor is Professor Satinder Singh.

III- Controling the Open Real Time Strategy (ORTS) Game Using Soar

SORTS = ORTS + Soar
The goal of this project is to interface Soar to a real-time strategy (RTS) game. RTS games, such as StarCraft, WarCraft, and Command and Conquer, are multi-player strategy games where a player needs to handle many different tasks- planning base layouts, managing economies, organizing attacks, responding to enemy attacks, and even diplomacy. This is all occurring in real time (as the name implies), presenting an extremely rich, challenging environment for an AI system. Making this environment accessible to Soar provides many opportunities for both utilizing existing capabilities and the development of new capabilities.

Soar
Soar is a general cognitive architecture for developing systems that exhibit intelligent behavior. Researchers all over the world, both from the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, are using Soar for a variety of tasks. It has been in use since 1983, evolving through many different versions to where it is now Soar, Version 9.0.


ORTS
The Open Real Time Strategy software is a highly configurable game engine used to play real time strategy (RTS) games [2]. The main purpose for ORTS is to serve as an open source, open interface RTS game engine for RTS AI tournaments. ORTS is undergoing active development as of July 2006 at the University of Alberta under the direction of Michael Buro.

IV- Starcraft AI Competition

Description from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at the University of California, Santa Cruz

"The 2010 conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2010) will be hosting a StarCraft AI competition as part of the conference program. This competition enables academic researchers to evaluate their AI systems in a robust, commercial RTS environment.  The competition will be held in the weeks leading up to the conference. The final matches will be held live at the conference with commentary. Exhibition matches will also be held between skilled human players and the top performing bots."

MSAIL seminars

Through a series of monthly seminars led by top AI faculty, wide cross sections of undergraduates are made aware of innovative research in AI and are invited to join in cognate projects.

Here are faculty that have led MSAIL seminars: