NEWS

  • All good things must end, and after 29 years at UMaine, following five years at UNH under a different name, MaineSAIL is closing its doors and shutting down. The director, Roy M. Turner (me), is retiring at the end of the 2023-24 academic year. I would like to thank the myriad undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the affiliates and friends, for the many, many good times and good conversations and, I think at least, good research over the years. I will still be reachable at my UMaine email, and if you were associated with the lab at one time or another, I’d love to hear from you sometime to find out how you’re doing. Best wishes for your continued success!
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    MaineSAIL, the Maine Software Agents/AI Laboratory, is closing down after 34 years at UNH and UMaine. While the director is sad to see the lab close, he is retiring. He is very proud of all the good work that has been done over the years and honored to have interacted with so many fine collaborators and students. Were she still with us, the other director, Elise H. Turner, would have been just as proud.

    Some facts about and history of MaineSAIL:

    • Started in 1990 by Elise H. Turner and Roy M. Turner at the University of New Hampshire as the Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving (CDPS) research group. Distributed AI (and CDPS in particular) was the first focus of the group. It was started specifically to give undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in computer science research. The CDPS group’s webpage was one of the first on campus at UNH.
    • CDPS research group moved to UMaine in 1995, when Elise and Roy accepted positions here. It was the only research lab in the Department of Computer Science for some time.
    • The group became MaineSAIL when Prof. Thomas Wagner joined the department; the name change reflected the expansion of the research portfolio (which had been ongoing for years) and that the lab was an umbrella for all AI work at UMaine (at the time). (It was also the only AI research group in the state for some years.)
    • Over 50 students (undergraduate and graduate) have been affiliated with the lab.
    • Members of the lab published 3 books, 6 edited volumes, 11 journal articles, 5 book chapters, 47 conference papers, and 24 workshop papers.
    • The lab brought in over $6 million in external funding (not including cost-sharing), primarily from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
    • The lab’s research has included a wide range of topics, including: natural language processing, discourse control, managing user interaction for a group of heterogeneous agents, interagent communication for low-bandwidth environments (underwater, e.g.), context-sensitive reasoning, mission planning for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and other intelligent agents, distributed AI, cooperative distributed problem solving for groups of AUVs and other instrument platforms, distributed context-sensitive reasoning, combining symbolic (context) and neural (simple fully-connected nets) AI, context-dependent deep learning, context-directed behavior, opportunistic reasoning, detecting miscreant agents in multiagent systems, learning in spiking neural networks, distributed explosive ordnance disposal, predator-prey interactions in early marine fouling communities, Gulf of Maine fisheries, multi-modal reasoning, computational chemistry, using deep learning systems to identify birds from aerial photographs of Maine islands, computer science education, and teaching elementary school students programming using Alice and Scratch. And I’ve probably left some out.

    Original web page continues below

    Welcome to MaineSAIL, the Maine Software Agents and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The laboratory, part of the School of Computing and Information Science, is the center of research in general artificial intelligence and multiagent systems at the University of Maine, and one of the AI labs in the School working on deep learning.

    Broadly, the research in MaineSAIL falls into several AI focus areas: intelligent control of real-world agents; context-sensitive reasoning; the organization and reorganization of multiagent systems; and deep learning. Our domain for projects in these areas tends to be controlling autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and multi-AUV systems, and a recent addition is in the area of wildlife ecology/management (counting birds on Maine’s islands using machine learning). In addition, other work in our lab focuses on computer science education, literate programming, and computational ecology. For information about all MaineSAIL projects, see our projects page.

    The lab, founded in 1989 at the University of New Hampshire (as the Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving Research Group), was created in large part to involve students in research. This continues to be a strong focus of the lab now. In addition to graduate students, the lab provides research experience for undergraduates doing senior or honors projects, Work Merit experience, independent study projects, and, when funding permits, paid work as research assistants. If you are a student and would like to get involved with the lab, see the description of student research opportunities on our projects page or contact the director (Roy Turner) directly.