Scale-up Revolution in Automated Planning (Or 1001 Ways to Skin a Planning Graph for Heuristic Fun & Profit)

Professor Subbarao Kambhampati

Department of Computer science and engineering, Arizona State University

Date and time: 11.30am-12.30pm, Friday 17th February, 2006

Venue: 10.08.04

Abstract:

A long-standing quest in Artificial Intelligence is the idea of providing an automated agent the ability to "plan", i.e., convert its high-level goals into an executable course of action. Planning has found practical applications in such diverse areas as supply-chain manufacturing, mission control for space flights, autonomic computing and web-service composition. Despite significant work, plan synthesis has for long remained a problem that was very difficult to scale-up. This is not surprising considering the fact that even the most constrained forms of planning are computationally hard. The primary revolution in automated planning in the recent years has been the development of powerful domain-independent heuristics for scaling up plan synthesis. Most of these heuristics involve doing reachability analysis with variants of a flexible data structure called planning graph. I will describe my research group's significant work on developing effective planning graph heuristics for a wide spectrum of planning problems, including classical, over-subscriptive, metric-temporal, non-deterministic and stochastic ones.

About the speaker:

Subbarao Kambhampati is a professor of computer science and engineering at Arizona State University, where he directs the Yochan research group. He also coordinates the inter-disciplinary initiative on Enabling Technologies for Intelligent Information Integration (ET-I3). His research and teaching interests are broadly split between automated planning and intelligent information integration, and he has published over a hundred papers in these areas. Kambhampati is the recipient of an NSF Research Initiation Award (1992), an NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), a College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award (2002) and an IBM Faculty Award (2004). In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence. He is an associate editor of Journal of AI Research and co-chaired the 2000 Intl. conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, and was the program co-chair of the National Conference on AI (AAAI-05).

Seminar Organisation

Seminars are free and open to the general public. No booking is necessary. If you are interested in giving a presentation in this seminar series, or to make suggestions for speakers, please contact Xiaodong Li, the seminar co-ordinator.