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  Bill Rounds 

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering, a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the theory group.
E-mail: rounds@eecs.umich.edu

Mail: UM AI Laboratory, 1101 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor MI 48109-2110, USA
Phone: (313) 764-9418
Fax: (313) 763-1260

Research Activities

I'm a theoretical computer scientist interested in AI. My research has involved mostly the subject called mathematics of language. The general idea is to make mathematical models of linguistic entities, ranging from grammars to semantics to pragmatics. I try to use the sophisticated tools of theoretical computer science to do this. This involves logic, automata theory, and tools from the semantics of programming languages. Some papers on this topic, written with Guo-Qiang Zhang, can be found here.


A new project is the design of programming languages for hybrid systems. Currently, I'm involved in extending Milner's pi-calculus to a new language which can interact with continuous environments. This is the hybrid pi-calculus, or phi-calculus. I'm planning to apply this language to design systems of robots which cooperate on product assembly tasks.  A technical report and conference article are available. A paper on spatial logic for these systems is here.

Here you can find a draft version of  a paper on using spatial and temporal logic to synthesize discrete event controllers.

I'm on sabbatical this year at CSLI, Stanford University.



 

updated June 30, 2003