Shiwali Mohan

Principal AI Scientist at SRI International, Future Concepts (formerly Xerox PARC)

I build intelligent collaborative agents that model, learn, and reason about their human collaborators. My research advances methods for complex sequential decision making, intelligent agent systems, as well as hybrid AI agent architectures built with statistical machine learning and knowledge-rich inference algorithms. I leverage insights from economics, psychology, education, and HCI to desgin effective and robust human-agent collaboration in real-world settings.

As a Principal Investigator at SRI International, I lead technology and business development for AI research. My work spans fundamental algorithmic advances in agent architectures as well applications of agent technology in real world usecases.

Fundamental Agent Research: I lead research on open-world learning agents (DARPA SAIL-ON) and on teachable agents (DARPA GAILA). Both these efforts study how agents can adapt to new situations after they are operational without the need of taking them offline and re-training. I study the role of structured representations in efficient & resilient agent architectures and investigate how they can be manipulated or adapted efficiently on-the-fly.

Agent Applications: I have designed interactive, collaborative agents for a variety of domains including patient-centric, preventative healthcare, sustainable living, general purpose robots, and augmented reality. I am particularly motivated to build intelligent collaborative technology social good and public welfare.

My work is interdisciplinary and has been published at venues for research on artificial intelligence (AIJ, JAIR, AAAI, IAAI), human cognition (ICCM, ACS, BICA), human-machine interaction (ACM TiiS, IEEE RO-MAN) as well as in applications (JMIR, EMBC, ACM/AAAI AIES).

news

Sep 1, 2024 Our work on open-world learning agents is published in the AI Journal.
Jul 9, 2024 Patent on natural language interaction with robots is granted!
Jun 4, 2024 We demonstrated open-world learning for UAVs and LLM+planning for embodied agents at ICAPS 24.
Sep 22, 2023 Giving an invited talk at the Allen Institute of AI on advances in model-based reasoning systems.
Jul 31, 2023 I was invited to the DARPA AI Forward initative to identify the directions AI research should take next.

selected publications

  1. AIJ
    A domain-independent agent architecture for adaptive operation in evolving open worlds
    Mohan, Shiwali, Piotrowski, Wiktor, Stern, Roni, Grover, Sachin, Kim, Sookyung, Le, Jacob, Sher, Yoni, and Kleer, Johan
    Artificial Intelligence 2024
  2. ACM TiiS
    Exploring the Role of Common Model of Cognition in Designing Adaptive Coaching Interactions for Health Behavior Change
    Mohan, Shiwali
    ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems 2021
  3. ACM TiiS
    Designing an AI Health Coach and Studying its Utility in Promoting Regular Aerobic Exercise
    Mohan, Shiwali, Venkatakrishnan, Anusha, and Hartzler, Andrea
    ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) 2020
  4. JAIR
    Acceptable planning: Influencing Individual Behavior to Reduce Transportation Energy Expenditure of a City
    Mohan, Shiwali, Rakha, Hesham, and Klenk, Matt
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 2019
  5. ACS
    Characterizing an Analogical Concept Memory for Architectures Implementing the Common Model of Cognition
    Mohan, Shiwali, Klenk, Matt, Shreve, Matthew, Evans, Kent, and Maxwell, John
    In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems 2020
  6. AAAI
    Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent Agents.
    Laird, John, and Mohan, Shiwali
    In Proeedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2018