Dr. Ron Alford
I am a researcher at MITRE investigating semi-autonomous operation for unmanned vehicles and the foundations of automated planning with procedural knowledge. My CV contains more information (last updated 2018-11-01).
Research Interests
I am interested in automated planning and description logics, with a special focus on the problems and opportunities that arise from expressive formalisms such as Hierarchical Task Network Planning.
Publications
You can find a list of my publications here or on my Google Scholar page. Most of my published software can be found on GitHub.
Education
I graduated with a PhD. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park. I previously graduated from Maryland with a B.S. in mathematics (2005) and computer science (2002).
Previous Employment
2014-2016
I was an ASEE Post-doctoral fellow at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, researching activity recognition, goal reasoning, and hierarchical planning.
2007-2014
I worked for Dana Nau at UMCP as a graduate research assistant. My research focused on automated planning, and in specific, search techniques for hierarchical planning.
Summer, 2007
I worked for Clark Parsia over the summer of 2007, helping out with Pellet and OWLSight. I extended Pellet's SWRL implementation and optimized rule execution.
2002-2007
After the first time I graduated from Maryland, I went to work for Jim Hendler at Mindswap as a faculty research assistant. While there, I helped maintain and extend several of the tools we used, including Pellet, SWOOP, and the RDF-backed homepage for the group.
