Griffith University

Director, Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems

Contact details for Professor Abdul Sattar

Professor Abdul Sattar is the founding Director of the Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems and a Professor of  Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Griffith University. He is also a Research Leader at National ICT Australia (NICTA) Queensland Research Lab (QRL),  where he has held the positions of QRL Education Director (2006-08) and Leader of the Smart Applications For Emergencies (SAFE) project (2005-08), and is currently leading the QRL node of NICTA's largest project, Advanced Technologies for Optimisation and Modelling In Constraints (ATOMIC).  He has been an academic staff member at Griffith University since February 1992 as a lecturer (1992-95), senior lecturer (1996-99), and professor (2000-present) within the School of Information and Communication Technology.  Prior to his career at Griffith University, he was a lecturer in Physics in Rajasthan, India (1980-82), and a research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India (1982-85), the University of Waterloo, Canada (1985-87), and the University of Alberta, Canada (1987-1991).

He has won several awards starting from national scholarships during his studies in India (1974-79) and a Commonwealth scholarship in Canada (1985-90), to a number of research grants. The main grants include 7 ARC Large/Discovery grants (worth approximately $1.5M). He was a principal researcher in the winning bid for the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) for Smart Internet (funding of over $50M for 7 years 2000-07), and one of the  four founding research leaders for the SAFE project ($3.7M for 2005-08). He led the successful bid for the establishment of IIIS (2003-07), and its renewal (2008-11) (funding approx $300,000 per year).  He has published over 120 refereed papers in international journals and conferences, a large number of these appearing in A*  and A category conferences and journals. His research team has won 3 international awards in recent years including the IJCAI 2007 Distinguished Paper award, Gold Medals in the 2005 and 2007 SAT solver competitions, and one his PhD students  won a first prize in the 2008 ICAPS planning competition. He has supervised the successful completion of 12 PhD students as principal supervisor.

Professor Sattar has delivered key-note addresses at several international conferences. His professional service includes editorial / review board membership of leading journals, and program committee or senior program committee memberships of numerous national and international conferences. He has played a leading role in establishing and running several high quality conferences in Artificial Intelligence. He served as Program or Conference Committee Chair for AI 1997, PRICAI 2002, TIME/ICTL 2003, AI 2006, AI 2007, PRICAI 2010. He has been an executive member and Chair of Sponsorship sub-committee for ACS National Committee on Artificial Intelligence since 1997, and Secretary/Treasurer of  PRICAI Steering Committee since 1998. He has been recently elected as the Chair of the PRICAI Steering Committee. He is a life member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a member of several professional bodies including the International Society for Applied Intelligence, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.

His research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, intelligent scheduling, rational agents, propositional satisfiability, temporal reasoning, temporal databases, and bioinformatics.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Hoque, T, Chetty, M., Lewis, A. & Sattar, A. (2009). Twin Removal in Genetic Algorithms for Protein Structure Prediction using Low Resolution Model. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. to appear.
• Hoque, T, Chetty, M. & Sattar, A. (2009). Extended HP Model for Protein Structure Prediction. Journal of Computational Biology. 16(1), 149-172.
• Bourne, O., Sattar, A. & Goodwin, S. D. (2008). A Constraint-Based Autonomous 3D Camera System. Constraints. 13(1-2), 180-205.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R., Gretton, C. & Sattar, A. (2008). Combining Adaptive and Dynamic Local Search for Satisfiability. Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation. 4, 149-172.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R. & Sattar, A. (2008). Modelling and Solving Temporal Reasoning as Propositional Satisfiability. Artificial Intelligence. 172(15), 1752-1782.
• Su, K., Sattar, A., Wang, K. & Luo, X. (2007). Model Checking Temporal Logics of Knowledge Via OBDDs. Computer Journal, 50(4), 403-420.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R. & Sattar, A. (2008). Efficiently Exploiting Dependencies in Local Search for SAT. In Dieter Fox, Carla Gomes (Eds.): Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2008, July 13-17, 2008, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1476-1478. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Su, K. & Sattar, A. (2008). An Extended Interpreted System Model for Epistemic Logics. In Dieter Fox, Carla Gomes (Eds.): Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2008, July 13-17, 2008, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 554-559. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Robinson, N., Gretton, C. & Sattar, A. (2008). A Compact and Efficient SAT Encoding for Planning. In Jussi Rintanen, Bernhard Nebel, J. Christopher Beck, Eric A. Hansen (Eds.): Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS 2008, September 14-18, 2008, Sydney, Australia, 296-303. AAAI Press.
• Su, K., Sattar, A., Lin, H. & Reynolds, M. (2007). A Modal Logic for Beliefs and Pro Attitudes. In : Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2007, July 22-26, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 496-501. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Cleaver, T. W. & Sattar, A. (2007). Intention Guided Belief Revision. In : Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2007, July 22-26, 2007, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 36-41. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R. & Sattar, A. (2007). Building Structure into Local Search for SAT. In Manuela M. Veloso (Ed.): Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2007, January 6-12, 2007, Hyderabad, India, 2359-2364. Winner of Distinguished Paper Award.
• Ishtaiwi, A., Thornton, J. R., Anbulagan, Sattar, A. & Pham, D. N. (2006). Adaptive Clause Weight Redistribution. In F. Benhamou (Ed.): Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2006, September 25-29, 2006, Nantes, France, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4204, 229-243, Hiedelberg: Springer.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R. & Sattar, A. (2006). Towards an Efficient SAT Encoding for Temporal Reasoning. In F. Benhamou (Ed.): Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2006, September 25-29, 2006, Nantes, France, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4204, 421-436, Hiedelberg. Springer.
• Wang, K., Sattar, A. & Su, K. (2005). A Theory of Forgetting in Logic Programming. In Manuela M. Veloso, Subbarao Kambhampati (Eds.): Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2005, July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, pp. 682-688. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Su, K., Sattar, A., Wang, K., Luo, X., Governatori, G. & Nair, V. (2005). The Observation-Based Model of BDI Agents. In Manuela M. Veloso, Subbarao Kambhampati (Eds.): Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2005, July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, pp. 190-195. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Anbulagan, Pham, D. N., Slaney, J. & Sattar, A. (2005). Old Resolution Meets Modern SLS. In Manuela M. Veloso, Subbarao Kambhampati (Eds.): Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2005, July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, pp. 354-359. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Pham, D. N., Thornton, J. R., Sattar, A. & Ishtaiwi, A. (2005). SAT-based versus CSP-based Constraint Weighting for Satisfiability. In Manuela M. Veloso, Subbarao Kambhampati (Eds.): Proceedings of the 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2005, July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, pp. 455-460. AAAI Press / The MIT Press.
• Thornton, J. R., Beaumont, M., Sattar, A. & Maher, M. (2004). A Local Search Approach to Modelling and Solving Interval Algebra Problems. Journal of Logic and Computation, 14(1), 93-112.
• Navarrete, I., Sattar, A., Wetprasit, R., & Marin, R. (2002). On point-duration networks for temporal reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 140(1-2), 39-70.
• Sattar, A. & Goebel, R. (1991). Using crucial literals to select better theories. Computational Intelligence, 7(1), 11-22.