website/content/research/_index.md

---
Title: Research
Description: A list of my research Projects
---

**[Quick List of Publications](/publications/)**

**Broad Research Interests:** Automated Reasoning, Automated Planning, Artificial Intelligence, Formal Methods

## Planning under Uncertainty

During my PhD I have been primarily focused on investigating planning and sequential decision
making under uncertainty through integrative methods:
- With [Selmer Bringsjord](https://homepages.rpi.edu/~brings/) in the [RAIR Lab](https://rair.cogsci.rpi.edu/) I have looked at planning through automated reasoning.
I further developed [Spectra](https://github.com/rairlab/spectra) and the underlying
planning with formulas framework to show classes of uncertainty problems that
are easy to encode. Additionally, I wrote a QA algorithm for ShadowProver to integrate to Spectra
for planning under epistemic uncertatinty.
- With [Junkyu Lee](https://researcher.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ibm-Junkyu.Lee),
[Michael Katz](https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=ibm-Michael.Katz1),
[Harsha Kokel](https://research.ibm.com/people/harsha-kokel), and [Shirin Sohrabi](https://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=us-ssohrab) at IBM I looked at guiding hiearchical reinforcement
learning agents under partial observability using discovery effects within a fully-observable non-determinsitic planner.
- More to come...


## Logic

Underlying my work in artificial intelligence and cryptography 
is computational logic. In that regard, I have been able
work on problems from the underlying logic formalisms,
unification algorithms, to building
tools for interactive theorem provers.

- With Andrew Marshall and Kimberly Cornell, we're currently developing a new syntactic AC algorithm.
- With Thomas Ferguson and James Oswald we looked at formalizing a model theory for a fragment of the Deontic Cognitive Event Calculus.
- With James Oswald we've worked on building interactive theorem provers and showing validity of proofs in parallel.


Related Notes:

- [Automated Theorem Proving](atp/)
- [Term Reasoning](termreasoning/)


## Symbolic Methods for Cryptography
Worked with [Andrew Marshall](https://www.marshallandrew.net/) and others in applying term reasoning within computational logic
towards cryptography. This collaboration was previously funded under an ONR grant. We are interested in applying techniques such
as unification and term rewriting to the following areas:
- Block Ciphers
- Secure Multi-party Computation
- Authentication
- Commitment Schemes

Together we built [CryptoSolve](https://github.com/cryptosolvers/CryptoSolve), a symbolic cryptographic analysis tool, and made it publically available on GitHub. I wrote the term algebra and rewrite libraries, and contributed to the mode of operation library and some unification algorithms.
I still help maintain the codebase, as well as contribute to our current work on Garbled Circuits. We previously presented our work
at  [UNIF 2020](https://www3.risc.jku.at/publications/download/risc_6129/proceedings-UNIF2020.pdf#page=58) ([slides](/files/research/UNIF2020-Slides.pdf)), [FROCOS 2021](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-86205-3_14) ([slides](/files/slides/FROCOS2021.pdf)), [WRLA 2022](http://sv.postech.ac.kr/wrla2022/assets/files/pre-proceedings-WRLA2022.pdf#page=12) ([slides](/files/slides/wrla2022-slides.pdf)),
and [GandALF 2022](/paper/2209.01/).


Collaborators:
- NRL: Catherine Meadows
- UMW: [Andrew Marshall](https://www.marshallandrew.net/)
- UT Dallas: Serdar Erbatur
- SUNY Albany: [Paliath Narendran](https://www.cs.albany.edu/~dran/) and Kimberly Cornell
- Clarkson University: [Christopher Lynch](https://people.clarkson.edu/~clynch/) and Hai Lin


Group Website: [https://cryptosolvers.github.io](https://cryptosolvers.github.io)


## Reinforcement Learning

During my undergraduate degree, I worked with [Dr. Ron Zacharski](http://zacharski.org/)
on making deep reinforcement learning algorithms more sample efficient with human feedback.

In my experimentation, I built out a Reinforcement Learning library in PyTorch.


*Links:*

|                                                              |                                                              |                                                              |
| ------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| [RL Library on Github](https://github.com/brandon-rozek/rltorch) | [Interactive Demonstrations Library](https://github.com/brandon-rozek/gyminteract) | [Undergraduate Honors Thesis](/files/research/honorsthesis.pdf) ([Eagle Scholar Entry](https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/305/)) |
| [Undergraduate Honors Defense](/files/research/ExpeditedLearningInteractiveDemo.pptx) | [QEP Algorithm Slides](/files/research/QEP.pptx)             | [More...](deepreinforcementlearning)                         |



[Dr. Stephen Davies](http://stephendavies.org/) guided my study of the fundamentals of reinforcement learning. We went over value functions, policy functions, how we can describe our environment as a markov decision processes, and other concepts.

[Notes and Other Goodies](reinforcementlearning/) / [Github Code](https://github.com/brandon-rozek/ReinforcementLearning)




## Other Research and Academic Activities

[**Excitation of Rb87**](rb87/): Worked in a Quantum Research lab alongside fellow student Hannah Killian under the guidance of Dr. Hai Nguyen. I provided software tools and assisted in understanding the mathematics behind the phenomena.

[Modeling Population Dynamics of Incoherent and Coherent Excitation](/files/research/modellingpopulationdynamics.pdf)

[Coherent Control of Atomic Population Using the Genetic Algorithm](/files/research/coherentcontrolofatomicpopulation.pdf)


[**Beowulf Cluster:**](lunac) In order to circumvent the frustrations I had with simulation code taking a while, I applied and received funding to build out a Beowulf cluster for the Physics department. Dr. Maia Magrakvilidze was the advisor for this project. [LUNA-C Poster](/files/research/LUNACposter.pdf)


[**Programming Languages:**](proglang/) Back in the Fall of 2018, under the guidance of Ian Finlayson, I worked towards creating a programming language similar to SLOTH (Simple Language of Tiny Heft). [SLOTH Code](https://github.com/brandon-rozek/SLOTH)

Before this study, I worked through a great book called ["Build your own Lisp"](https://www.buildyourownlisp.com/).


[**Competitive Programming:**](progcomp/) Studying algorithms and data structures necessary for competitive programming. Attended ACM ICPC in November 2018/2019 with a team of two other students.

**Cluster Analysis:** The study of grouping similar observations without any prior knowledge. I studied this topic by deep diving Wikipedia articles under the guidance of Dr. Melody Denhere during Spring 2018. **[Extensive notes](clusteranalysis/)**