Papers

Planning for Robots

• Scott Kiesel, Ethan Burns, Wheeler Ruml, J. Benton, and Frank Kreimendahl, Open World Planning via Hindsight Optimization, University of New Hampshire Technical Report 12-03, 2012.
• Scott Kiesel, Ethan Burns, and Wheeler Ruml, Abstraction-guided Sampling for Motion Planning, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-12), 2012.
  
  An earlier version of this work was released as a technical report: Scott Kiesel, Ethan Burns, and Wheeler Ruml, Abstraction-guided Sampling for Motion Planning, University of New Hampshire Technical Report 12-01, 2012.
• Scott Kiesel, Ethan Burns, Christopher Wilt, and Wheeler Ruml, Integrating Vehicle Routing and Motion Planning, Proceedings of the Twenty-second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-12), 2012. Scott's slides (PDF).

Parallel Heuristic Search

• Ethan Burns and Rong Zhou, Parallel Model Checking Using Abstraction, Proceedings of the Nineteenth International SPIN Workshop on Model Checking of Software (SPIN-12), 2012.
• Matthew Hatem, Ethan Burns and Wheeler Ruml, Heuristic Search for Large Problems With Real Costs, Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11), 2011.
• Ethan Burns, Sofia Lemons, Wheeler Ruml and Rong Zhou, Best-First Heuristic Search for Multicore Machines, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, volume 39, pages 689-743, 2010.
  
  A summary of this work was published as: Ethan Burns, Sofia Lemons, Rong Zhou and Wheeler Ruml, Parallel Best-First Search: The Role of Abstraction, Proceedings of the AAAI-10 Workshop on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (WARA-10), 2010. slides (PDF).
  
  A previous summary of this work was published as: Ethan Burns, Seth Lemons, Rong Zhou and Wheeler Ruml, Parallel Best-First Search: Optimal and Suboptimal Solutions, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-09), 2009.
• Ethan Burns, Seth Lemons, Wheeler Ruml and Rong Zhou, Suboptimal and Anytime Heuristic Search on Multi-Core Machines, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-09), 2009. slides (PDF).
• Ethan Burns, Seth Lemons, Rong Zhou and Wheeler Ruml, Best-First Heuristic Search for Multi-Core Machines, Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09), 2009. slides (PDF), please email me for the source code.

Other Search and Planning

• Ethan Burns, Matthew Hatem, Michael J. Leighton, and Wheeler Ruml, Implementing Fast Heuristic Search Code, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-12), 2012. source
• Ethan Burns, J. Benton, Wheeler Ruml, Sungwook Yoon, and Minh Do, Anticipatory On-line Planning, Proceedings of the Twenty-second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-12), 2012. slides (PDF).
• Ethan Burns and Wheeler Ruml, Iterative-Deepening Search with On-line Tree Size Prediction, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, pages 1-23, 2013.
  
  An earlier version of this work appeared as: Ethan Burns and Wheeler Ruml, Iterative-Deepening Search with On-line Tree Size Prediction, Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Learning and Intelligent Optimization (LION-12), 2012. slides (PDF).
  
  It was also released as a technical report: Ethan Burns and Wheeler Ruml, On-line Tree Size Prediction using Incremental Models, University of New Hampshire Technical Report 11-01, 2011.
• Kevin Rose, Ethan Burns, and Wheeler Ruml, Best-first Search for Bounded-depth Trees, Proceedings of the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-11), 2011.
• Bradford Larsen, Ethan Burns, Wheeler Ruml and Robert C. Holte, Searching Without a Heuristic: Efficient Use of Abstraction, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10), 2010. Brad's slides(PDF), code is available from Brad.

High-Performance Network Storage

• Ethan Burns, Implementation and Comparison of iSCSI Over RDMA, Master's Thesis, University of New Hampshire, 2008.
  
  A summary of this work was published as: Ethan Burns and Robert Russell, Implementation and Evaluation of iSCSI Over RDMA, Proceedings of Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Storage Network Architecture and Parallel I/Os (SNAPI-08), 2008. slides (PDF).

Talks

UNH CS900

• Understanding Your Data Through Plots
  University of New Hampshire, CS 900 Graduate Seminar, September 13, 2012
  A talk about plotting, SPT, and Plotinum

  Abstract: Graduate students tend to generate a lot of data, both to understand their new ideas and to demonstrate to others which of their ideas work well. It is often tempting to display this data in an easy-to-create raw format such as a table filled with numbers. Unfortunately, such formats fail to truly show the information that the data provides, because it is difficult to see trends in a mess of raw numbers. Luckily, there are many effective techniques for displaying data graphically that allow us to quickly and clearly see what is really going on. I will present a set of useful methods for plotting data along with a brief introduction to the tools that I have used in my own research to help me see the results of the many, many experiments that I have run over my career as a graduate student.

Experience

Research Assistantship

From the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2012, I was a research assistant for Professor Wheeler Ruml. During this time, I did research on parallel heuristic search, disk-based heuristic search, hierarchical search, state space size estimation, continual planning with goal arrivals, and robot motion planning.

Palo Alto Research Center

During the summer of 2011 I worked as an intern at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). While there, I did research with Dr. Rong Zhou on parallel search for model checking with the Spin model checker.

Teaching Assistantship

I have been a teaching assistant at the University of New Hampshire for a variety of courses including: Algorithms (2010), Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (2009), and Object-oriented Methodology (2006-2008).

University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab

I worked for the UNH-IOL for most of my undergraduate and master's degrees. While I was at the IOL I worked in the following consortia:

• iWARP - Here I worked on development for UNH-iSCSI (with iSER) and SoftWARP (a software iWARP implementation for the Linux kernel).
• iSCSI - I did some of my work on the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) in the iSCSI group.
• IPv6 - I worked in the IPv6 consortium adding support for IPSec and IKE over IPv6 to an in-house testing tool.
• IPv4 - I worked in the IPv4 consortium adding support for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to an in-house testing tool.

Code

Current Projects

• Plotinum is a plotting package for the Go programming language.
• SPT is a simple plotting tool written in Objective Caml. SPT serves as an OCaml library for plotting and it comes with a tool called spt-it-out for plotting from the command-line using a simple input file format.

Previous Projects

• Mid is small adventure game that I worked on for a bit with Steve McCoy. It is a 2D platform game, however, each 'level' has doors leading back and forth between z layers making for a 3D-style maze. The automatic content generation uses a pipeline allowing you to plug in different programs to generate the different level features such as the maze, interactive environment objects, items, and enemies. Steve did all of the art so it looks better than any other games that I have ever worked on.
• liblinuxkernel is a small library that Dr. Russell and I wrote while I was working on my Master's thesis. Basically, it implements some of the Linux kernel API in user space to allow some kernel code to compile completely in user space. We used this library to enable the UNH-iSCSI driver for Linux to run completely in user space.
• My CS830 final project was a bot that will play the old BSD hunt the wumpus game. The bot uses an algorithm based on maintaining arc consistency along with a tiny CSP solver to make inferences about the locations of pits and the evil wumpus. Using this information, a planner selects rooms to explore that it suspects are safe. Eventually the bot can often locate and shoot the wumpus to beat the game. The bot is better than the average human player who and is about on par with a good human player (but obviously, the bot is much faster than any human).
• When studying for the compiler design qual., I made a simple lexer generator called lexit. It reads a simple description and builds an automata to do string tokenizing.
• Glutboard is a project that I did while I was an undergrad in order to experiment with OpenGL and computer graphics. It is a 3D chessboard front-end for gnuchess which uses the OpenGL and Glut libraries. It supports both simple and projected shadows, reflections, full-scene anti-aliasing, highlighting of in-danger pieces, and highlighting legal moves.

Files

Some useful configuration files:

• My .screenrc file.
• My .acme file with acme configuration.
• My .emacs file. Automatically does setup for the UNH-AI research machines if you are logged in from one.
• tla-mode for emacs ( TLA+). This is a modified version of a file that I found in the tubes. I fixed this because the syntax highlighting was broken. Additionally, this appears to have TLA+ indentation support and a few small functions like "comment-region" and "un-comment-region".
• tla.vim for TLA+ on vim (thanks to Matt Sherman for most of this and minor modifications/additions by Zoe D.).