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Stefano Ermon Ph.D. Candidate Department of Computer Science 4142 Upson Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: ermonste AT cs.cornell.edu

About Me

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, working with Professor Carla Gomes and Professor Bart Selman. I received a B.Sc. (2006) and M.Sc. (2008) both in Electrical Engineering from the University of Padova.

Research Interests

• Probabilistic Reasoning and Inference
• Computational Sustainability
• Sequential Decision Making, Control Theory, and Dynamical Systems

Honors and Awards

• NIPS 2011 Travel Award.
• Best Student Paper Award, 16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-2010).
• Full Scholarship, DIMACS Workshop and Advanced Study Institute in Conservation Biology, Southern African Wildlife College, South Africa, 2010.
• McMullen Fellowship, Cornell University, Fall 2008-Spring 2009.
• CRP Prize for outstanding graduate students, awarded by Cassa Rurale di Pergine, 2008.
• Best 2007, selected as one of the 50 best graduates among all fields of study in Italy, 2007.
  (Click here for a video of the award ceremony with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.)
• Full Scholarship, Workshop on Scalable Approaches to High Performance and High Productivity Computing (ScalPerf), 2006.
• CRP Prize for outstanding undergraduate students, awarded by Cassa Rurale di Pergine, 2006.

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Publications

Conference Papers (Refereed and Archived)

1. Stefano Ermon, Ronan Le Bras, Carla Gomes, Bart Selman, and Bruce van Dover.
   SMT-Aided Combinatorial Materials Discovery. [PDF]
   To appear in Proc. 15th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT), June 2012
   [Full paper, acceptance rate: 29/88 (33%)]
2. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, Bart Selman, and Alexander Vladimirsky.
   Probabilistic planning with non-linear utility functions and worst case guarantees. [PDF]
   To appear in Proc. 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), June 2012
   [Full paper, acceptance rate: 137/671 (20.5%)]
3. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman.
   Accelerated Adaptive Markov Chain for Partition Function Computation. [draft]
   To appear in Proc. 25th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), December 2011.
   [Spotlight presentation, acceptance rate: 66/1400 (4.7%)]
4. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman.
   A Flat Histogram Method for Computing the Density of States of Combinatorial Problems. [PDF] [Video]
   In Proc. 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), July 2011. Invited paper.
5. Stefano Ermon, Jon Conrad, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman.
   Risk-Sensitive Policies for Sustainable Renewable Resource Allocation. [PDF] [Video]
   In Proc. 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), July 2011.
   [oral presentation, acceptance rate: 227/1325 (17%)]
6. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman.
   A Message Passing Approach to Multiagent Gaussian Inference for Dynamic Processes. [PDF]
   In Proc. 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), May 2011.
7. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman. Computing the Density of States of Boolean Formulas. [PDF] [Slides]
   In Proc. 16th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP), September 2010.
   Best student paper award.
8. Stefano Ermon, Jon Conrad, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman.
   Playing Games against Nature: Optimal Policies for Renewable Resource Allocation. [PDF]
   In Proc. 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), July 2010.
   [plenary oral presentation, acceptance rate: 30/260 (11.5%)]
   (also presented at the 2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability, June 2010, the 1st DIMACS
   Workshop on Conservation Biology, July 2010, and the 3rd International Workshop on Constraint Reasoning and
   Optimization for Computational Sustainability, September 2010)
9. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman.
   Collaborative Multiagent Gaussian Inference in a Dynamic Environment Using Belief Propagation. [PDF]
   In Proc. 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), May 2010.
10. Stefano Ermon, Luca Schenato, and Sandro Zampieri. [PDF]
    Trust Estimation in Autonomic Networks: a Statistical Mechanics Approach.
    In Proc. 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), December 2009.

Working Papers (in submission)

1. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman. The Density of States of Hard Combinatorial Problems.
   Invited to the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).

Workshop Papers and Other Work

1. Stefano Ermon, Yexiang Xue, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman. Combinatorial Decision Making in Complex, Uncertain, and Highly Dynamic Environments.
   In Third International Conference on Computational Sustainability, July 2012.
2. Stefano Ermon, Eoin O'Mahony, and Carla Gomes. Towards Probabilistic Contact Network Discovery.
   In NIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Sustainability (MLSUST), December 2011.
3. Stefano Ermon, Carla Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman.
   A Flat Histogram Method for Inference with Probabilistic and Deterministic Constraints. [PDF]
   In NIPS Workshop on Monte Carlo Methods for Modern Applications and NIPS Workshop on
   Discrete Optimization in Machine Learning (DISCML): Structures, Algorithms and Applications, December 2010.
4. Stefano Ermon. Trust Estimation in Autonomic Networks: a Message Passing Approach. [PDF]
   In Proc. 1st IFAC Workshop on Estimation and Control of Networked Systems (NecSys), September 2009.
5. Stefano Ermon. Optimal Control Techniques for Virtual Memory Management. [PDF]
   M.S. Thesis, University of Padova, July 2008. Advisor: Professor Gianfranco Bilardi.

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Professional Service

• Program Committee Member, AAAI-2012 (Main Track and Comp-Sust Track), AAAI-2011 and IJCAI-2011.
• Reviewer, CP-2012, SAT-2012, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Environmental and Resource Economics, CPAIOR-2012, and North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence (NESCAI).

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Software and Benchmarks

• Benchmark instances for the FocusedFlatSat algorithm [NIPS 2011].
• Source code and benchmark instances for the MCMCFlatSat algorithm [CP 2010].
• Free Educational Software for the preparation of the Italian Medical Licensing Examination,
  with a user-friendly GUI and over 6,000 multiple-choice questions. (Click here for User's Guide in Italian). New: updated version with more questions.

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Teaching Experience

• Instructor, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University (Fall 2011)
  CS1130: Transition to Object-oriented Programming
• Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University (Spring 2011)
  CS6702: Computational Sustainability
• M.Eng. Co-Supervisor, Department of Computer Science, Cornell University (Spring 2011)
  Saurav Kumar. Applying Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Improve Power Demand for Electric Cars.
  Master of Engineering in Computer Science Project.

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Other Interests

Coming soon...

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©2011 Stefano Ermon