ACAI Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling

Call for Participation (Deadline expired)

The ability to plan one's actions autonomously and to schedule given actions is a crucial capability of intelligent agents – and therefore planning and scheduling is one of the central research areas in AI. In particular, the last 15 years have seen a tremendous advance in planning and scheduling research, both theoretically and practically. Much of this progress is not adequately covered in AI courses and textbooks, yet. Therefore this summer school, the 2011 Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI-11), aims at providing participants with an in-depth look into the field of Automated Planning and Scheduling.

The ACAI summer school is an intense four-day educational and mentoring program for graduate students and young researchers. The school will bring together subject experts in order to introduce the foundations of automated planning and scheduling and the broad range of current approaches, and to consider ways of developing and exploiting these to build a realistically usable tool for complex problem-solving. Likewise, we hope the school will also provide a lively forum for attendees to discuss their research lines.

Courses and Lecturers

The following tutorials will be presented at ACAI 2011:

Chris Beck: Is Scheduling Still AI?
Blai Bonet: Non-Deterministic Planning
Carmel Domshlak: Complexity Analysis in Planning: From Theory of Practice to Practice of Theory
Peter Gorniak: Planning in the Computer Game Industry: Opportunities, Methods and Challenges
Joerg Hoffmann: Evaluating Planning Algorithms, or: How to Count Sheep?
Subbarao Kambhampati: Back to the Future of Planning
Emil Keyder and Silvia Richter: Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning
Julie Porteous: Interactive Storytelling: "It's Planning, Jim, but not as we know it"
Brian Williams: Robust, Model-based Execution

In order to not only teach students the foundations of the field, but also get them into contact with the planning and scheduling research community and give them access to the latest developments in the field, ACAI-11 will be co-located with the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2011). ACAI students will have free access to the ICAPS pre-conference programme (workshops and tutorials).

Venue

The summer school will take place at Schloss Reinach, a scenic hotel a few kilometres from the ICAPS conference site in Freiburg, Germany, from June 7-10, 2011.

Organisation

Michael Brenner (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Malte Helmert (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Bernhard Nebel (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Gabriele Röger (University of Freiburg, Germany)

If you have any enquiries, please e-mail brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Application and Important Dates

Application to the summer school will require submission of

the completed application form
a CV and
an intention letter describing how the applicant's planned research is connected to the topics of automated planning and scheduling.
Students will also be required to provide a recommendation letter from their research advisors (to be sent directly to Michael Brenner, brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de).

To apply, please send the above documents to Michael Brenner by email (brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de).

Important dates:

Application deadline: February 18, 2011
Notification: March 18, 2011
Registration: April 29, 2011

In order to ensure the success of the school, the registration will be restricted to 60 participants. In case of over-application, the preference will be given to students at the beginning of their research path.

Registration Fee and Support

The registration fee is 450 EUR. It covers:

Admission to all ACAI-11 courses
Admission to the ICAPS-11 pre-conference programme (workshops and tutorials)
Accommodation from June 6 - June 9 at Schloss Reinach in a double room. For participants who want to stay in a single room, the registration fee increases by 80 EUR. (Accommodation during the ICAPS pre-conference programme is not included in the fee.)
Breakfasts, lunches and coffee breaks at Schloss Reinach

Every student accepted into the summer school can apply for a grant that can be used to partially cover registration fee, accommodation, and travel expenses. Request for such financial support should be indicated on the application. Decisions about allocation and size of the grants will be announced after notification, in April, 2011.