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- No new graduate students being accepted:
- Since Dr. Turner will be retiring shortly, he is no longer taking new MS or PhD students. If you are interested in AI at UMaine, however, you can’t go wrong with any of these excellent professors in the School of Computing and Information Science: Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh, Chaofan Chen, Terry Yoo, Sepideh Ghanavati, or Torsten Hahmann
- First cohort of Computing Community for Good matriculated:
- The first group of CCG scholars matriculated in fall 2023.
- “Computing Community for Good” grant awarded:
- NSF has awarded the School a grant of ~$1.5 million for a project aimed at increasing retention and success of computing students through curriculum development, community support, and service learning. The PI is Penny Rheingans, and Roy Turner is one of the Co-PIs. More information about the grant can be found here. The term of the grant is from 15 October 2022 to 30 September 2028.
- Foundations of Computer Science (2nd edition) published:
- A new edition of Foundations of Computer Science (authors: Roy M. Turner and Elise H. Turner) has been published by Kendall Hunt Publishers as an online textbook. This textbook is used in COS 140, and the first edition was published by Top Hat Monacle. For more information, see here.
- Context-based reasoning book published:
- Roy Turner is co-editor of a new book on pragmatic context-based reasoning: Modeling and Using Context in Action (Patrick Brézillon & Roy M. Turner), ISTE Ltd., September 2022. He also wrote a chapter and co-wrote two others with Brézillon, and MaineSAIL PhD student Chris Wilson wrote a chapter as well.
- AI Seed Grant awarded:
- A $42,050 seed grant from the UMaine AI Initiative was awarded for August 2020–July 2021 that focuses on context-dependent deep learning for sea bird recognition in drone survey imagery. PIs: R.M. Turner, C. Loftin (Wildlife Ecology) , and S. Yasaei-Sekeh (SCIS).
- NSF MRI grant awarded:
- A $350,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (matched by $150,000 from UMaine) was received in Fall 2019 under the major research instrumentation (MRI) program to fund the acquisition of a high-performance computing instrument to support deep learning, modeling/simulation, and visualization for STEM at UMaine and across the region. The PI was Roy Turner, with co-PIs Bruce Segee (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Peter Koons (Earth and Climate Sciences), Huijie Xue (Marine Sciences), and Sofian Audry (now in Communications and Media at Clarkson University); there were ~30 senior personnel from across the state also involved.
- Textbook published:
- A textbook for COS 140 written by two MaineSAIL members, Roy Turner and Elise Turner (deceased), has been accepted for publication by Top Hat Monocle (Toronto, Canada). The book, Foundations of Computer Science, will be available electronically on the Top Hat marketplace after Fall 2019.
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Welcome to MaineSAIL, the Maine Software Agents and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The laboratory, part of the School of Computing and Information Science, is the center of research in general artificial intelligence and multiagent systems at the University of Maine, and one of the AI labs in the School working on deep learning.
Broadly, the research in MaineSAIL falls into several AI focus areas: intelligent control of real-world agents; context-sensitive reasoning; the organization and reorganization of multiagent systems; and deep learning. Our domain for projects in these areas tends to be controlling autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and multi-AUV systems, and a recent addition is in the area of wildlife ecology/management (counting birds on Maine’s islands using machine learning). In addition, other work in our lab focuses on computer science education, literate programming, and computational ecology. For information about all MaineSAIL projects, see our projects page.
The lab, founded in 1989 at the University of New Hampshire (as the Cooperative Distributed Problem Solving Research Group), was created in large part to involve students in research. This continues to be a strong focus of the lab now. In addition to graduate students, the lab provides research experience for undergraduates doing senior or honors projects, Work Merit experience, independent study projects, and, when funding permits, paid work as research assistants. If you are a student and would like to get involved with the lab, see the description of student research opportunities on our projects page or contact the director (Roy Turner) directly.
