Valtorta

Dr. Valtorta is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in computer science from Duke University. He is the author of over 30 refereed publications and an associate editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning. His research interests are in the areas of normative reasoning under uncertainty (especially Bayesian networks, influence diagrams, and their use in multiagent systems), heuristics for problem solving, and computational complexity in artificial intelligence. As a faculty member, he has conducted research funded by ARDA, SPAWAR, DARPA, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (DOA), CISE (an Italian laboratory controlled by ENEL, the state electricity company), and he South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. He is Project Manager and co-PI (with Dr. Huhns) on Intelligence-Community funded research on the use and representation of prior and tacit knowledge for analysts and was recently a senior researcher on a SPAWAR (Charleston)-funded project that models the spread of damage in critical installations. Between 1985 and 1988, he was a project officer for ESPRIT at the Commission of the European Communities in Brussels, where he supervised projects in the Advanced Information Processing area. He is the author of approximately 20 articles in refereed journals, 20 papers in books or refereed conference proceedings, 15 workshop papers, and 30 contract and non-contract reports. Dr. Valtorta is an associate editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, a member of the editorial board of Applied Intelligence and of the Journal of Applied Management and Technology, and has been a reviewer for over 20 international journals, over 35 conferences, and over a dozen textbooks. In particular, he was a member of the program committee of the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference in 1996 through 1999, 2001, and 2006, of the European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty in 2003, and of the European Workshops on Probabilistic Graphical Models in 2006 and 2008. He was a Lilly teaching fellow in 1993-94. Dr. Valtorta is a member of AAAI, ACM, IEEE, and Sigma Xi. He spent parts of his 1999-2000 sabbatical year at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Aalborg, in Denmark.

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science, Duke University, (1987)
• M.A., Computer Science, Duke University (1984)
• Laurea, Electrical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano (1980)

Selected Publications

• M. Valtorta and Y. Huang. Identifiability in Causal Bayesian Networks: A Gentle Introduction. Cybernetics and Systems, 39, 4 (May 2008), 425-442.
• Y. Huang and M. Valtorta. Pearl's Calculus of Intervention in Complete. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-06), Cambridge, MA, July 13-16, 2006, pp.437-444.
• S. Mani, M. Valtorta, and S. McDermott. Building Bayesian Network Models in Medicine: the MENTOR Experience.
  Applied Intelligence, 22, 2 (March/April 2005), 93-108.
• M. Valtorta, J. Vomlel, and Y.-G. Kim. Soft Evidential Update for Multiagent Systems. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 29, 1 (January 2002), 71-106.
• O. Hansson, A. Mayer, and M. Valtorta. A New Result on the Complexity of Heuristic Estimates for the A* Algorithm. Artificial Intelligence, 55, 1 (May 1992), 129-143.