Avi Pfeffer

Associate Professor of Computer Science
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University

Regular office hours for Spring 2008: Friday 2:30-4.

Courses

Fall 2006   CS281r: Planning, without and with Uncertainty
Spring 2006   CS181: Intelligent Machines - Perception, Learning and Uncertainty
Fall 2005   CS282: Probabilistic Reasoning
Fall 2003   CS281r: AI and Music
Fall 2001       CS281r: Computational Game Theory

Tutorial

Here is a tutorial on first-order probabilistic languages that I presented with Lise Getoor at IJCAI 2005.

Research

My research focuses on the design of intelligent systems that perform well in the real world. The world is a challenging place - it is large and complex, and it keeps on changing, often in unpredictable ways. I am particularly interested in systems that can deal effectively with uncertainty. Some current projects:

IBAL: A general representation language for probabilistic reasoning and decision-theoretic agents
Modeling agents' beliefs and decision making processes in games
Probabilistic models of music
Efficient hierarchical probabilistic inference in dynamic systems

Older projects:

Probabilistic Reasoning for Complex Systems
Learning Rich Probabilistic Models
Effective Algorithms for Game-Theoretic Problems

Publications

Contact Information

Maxwell Dworkin 251
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Tel: 617-496-1876
Fax: 617-496-1066

avi@eecs.harvard.edu