Good Grad: About the Author

How to Be a Good Graduate Student
by Marie desJardins

Dr. Marie desJardins is a senior computer scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. She will be joining the faculty of the computer science department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in August 2001.

She has technical interests in machine learning, planning, multi-agent systems, information management, reasoning with uncertainty, and decision theory. Since joining SRI in 1991, she has led or participated in numerous applied research projects, primarily in the areas of planning and machine learning. Machine learning projects have included mixed-initiative methods for knowledge acquisition, prediction of biochemical function of enzymes, partially automating the development of planning knowledge for AI planning systems, and modeling student learning behavior in intelligent tutoring systems. Planning projects have included negotiation and self-organization methods in multi-agent systems, distributed plan deconfliction techniques and hybrid generative/case-based planning methods for maritime campaign planning, a planning architecture that supports distributed planning and scheduling agents, and task-based information distribution in collaborative environments.

Dr. desJardins has presented papers and chaired several workshops in the areas of planning and machine learning; has edited special issues of the Machine Learning Journal and AI Magazine; has reviewed papers for numerous journals, conferences, and workshops; was on the program committees for ICMAS-2000, AAAI-98, AAAI-96, ICML-94, AAI-94, and AAAI-93; and was the Chair of the AAAI-2000 Workshop Program.

She wrote a paper entitled 'How to Succeed in Graduate School: A Guide for Students and Advisors' that was published in Crossroads, the online ACM student magazine, and has been distributed widely on the Internet. She was the president of Women in Computer Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley, and has been involved in many activities to improve the quality of graduate school instruction and mentoring, particularly for women graduate students.

Dr. desJardins was awarded a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, where her dissertation presented a model for autonomous machine learning in probabilistic domains. She received her A.B. in engineering / computer science from Harvard University in 1985. She can be reached at SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park CA 94025; Internet: marie@ai.sri.com.