Hakim Newton's Home

News...

26.11.2008: I moved to Bangladesh and joined my previous job in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).

23.09.2008: Good News! I passed my PhD viva yesterday with minor corrections. The obvious next target is to give a PhD to somebody else to justfy that I am a PhD holder and deserve to write a Dr. before my name!

16.09.2008: Good News! Wizard clearly won 2 out of 6 domains in efficiency and obtained 2nd position in learning for improvement but 3rd and 4th position in overall performance among 13 participant systems in the 6th International Planning Competition 2008 Learning Track. Wizard is a macro-learning method and its co-participant planners were Metric-FF and SGPlan. Note, in the competition, Wizard learnt macros that help obtain faster planning (i.e. efficiency), no matter how they affect plan-length (i.e. quality). Please click here to get the poster on the result.

03.09.2008: I have released Wizard's source code. For downloading instructions, please visit its home page by clicking here. Besides plan-time and plan-length, this version learns macro-actions for improving plan-metric in numerical domains.

31.07.2008: I have a poster paper accepted in the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2008. The paper titles Learning Macros That Are Not Captured by Given Example Plans.

13.01.2009: I am still working on macro-learning for planning. This extends our previous work in learning macros that are not observable from given plans and learning macro-sets considering possible interactions between constituent macros.

Research: My research interests lie generally in studying and imitating the underlying wisdom of the Nature. This means I am interested in building intelligent agents. For this, I choose the multi-disciplinary subject of Artificial Intelligence. More specifically, I like working in the areas of Modelling, Planning, Learning, Interaction, Fuzziness, and Uncertainty.
Teaching: My teaching interests lie mostly in the topics related to my research. However at the undergraduate level, I also like teaching foundations of computing, programming languages, data structures and algorithms, system analysis and design, and database systems.
Development: My software development interests mostly lie in building database systems that have various complexities like large data volume, distributed nature, real time concurrent transactions. I am particularly interested in applying artificial planning and learning technologies to automatically composing and optimising dynamically presented user queries.
Miscellaneous: I have profound interests in philosophy and theology; I spend considerable time in pursuing them. Also, I have immense interests in politics of Bangladesh and the World. I enjoy political analyses from different radically opposite perspectives.

Research: I run a research group named PlayGroup in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh. PlayGroup has its focus on Artificial Intelligence Learning, Planning, Scheduling, Satisfiability, and Games. I am also a member of the Strathclyde Planning Group (SPG) in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom. SPG is internationally known for its work in the Artificial Intelligence Planning area.
Teaching: I am a member of the academic staff in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka, Bangladesh. BUET is the top-ranked engineering school in Bangladesh.

Office E-mail: newton@cis.strath.ac.uk. This is for any official purpose and also for anything related to research.
BUET E-mail: newton@cse.buet.ac.bd. Any one related to BUET, please use this address for any matter.
Research E-mail: mahnewton@gmail.com. This is only for research and professional communications.
Public E-mail: mahnewton@yahoo.com. For those who I do not know. Also, for non-research email groups.
Personal E-mail: mahnewton@hotmail.com. For those who I know personally; for example, friends and family.
Office Phone: +880 2 966 5650, ext 7202 Office Fax: +880 2 966 5612 Mobile Phone: +880 17 1320 6886.
Office Address: CSE649 EME Building, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Home Address: 47/6-E Dhakesshori Campus, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.