International Summer School on AI Planning

28 September - 1st October 2000
Coral Beach Hotel, Cyprus

General Information

Domain independent planning is a thriving area of research in both Europe and the US, encompassing an increasingly diverse range of techniques and approaches. Although domain independent planning has been a lively area of academic research for many years, the resulting technology has had few large scale applications in the industrial and commercial sectors. An important barrier to their use has been the poor performance of the proposed techniques when used directly on commercial or industrial problem instances. The techniques have, typically, only been able to deal with very small instances of planning problems. Another important barrier to the widespread use of planning technology is the need to acquire planning expertise before it is possible to be an effective user.

The development of basic planning technology has made important strides forward in recent years. Some new efficient approaches to AI planning have been proposed (Graphplan-based planning, SAT/CSP-based planning, planning as model checking, efficient HTN planning, planning as heuristic search, etc.) which have dramatically increased the scale and complexity of problem instances that can be tackled by domain-independent technology. The planning systems based on these approaches have been shown to be drastically more efficient than earlier ones, and therefore constitute a promising foundation for real application. Whilst many of these planning approaches have so far been focussed on highly restricted domain representations there have been some important recent developments in the expressive power of the domain representation languages that can be handled, allowing the modelling of time, continuous processes and resources. Much of the power of the modern planning approaches derives from their effective search algorithms and heuristics, the efficient representations of the search spaces they explore, and from the ability of some of these systems to exploit domain knowledge, either supplied by a domain expert or automatically inferred using domain analysis techniques.

The school will bring together subject experts, from several countries in Europe and America, in order to introduce the broad range of current planning approaches and to consider ways of developing and exploiting these to make planning a realistically usable tool for complex problem-solving.

Lecturers and Courses

The school offers seven courses, each comprising two/three seminars of approximately ninety minutes in length. The lecturers are:

Dr. Hector Geffner (University Simón Bolívar, Venezuela)
Heuristic Search Planning: Models, Heuristics, and Algorithms

Dr. Malik Ghallab (LAAS-CNRS, France)
Planning with time and resources

Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State University, USA)
A Unifying and Brand-Name-Free Introduction to Planning

Dr. Derek Long (University of Durham, UK)
Pre-processing and Domain Analysis

Prof. Dana Nau (University of Maryland, USA)
Ordered Task Decomposition: Theory and Applications

Prof. Bernhard Nebel (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Computational Complexity of Planning and Expressiveness of Planning Formalisms

Dr. Paolo Traverso (IRST-ITC, Italy)
Planning as model checking

The school will also run a general session in which posters will be displayed and demonstrations performed. Any participants interested in displaying a poster on their current work, or in giving a demonstration of a planning system, or of some component of a planning system, should send a short proposal (between 1000 and 2000 words) to one of the technical chairs by the deadline for the first stage of registration (see below). Notification of acceptance of such proposals will be made by July 30.

Please note: anyone intending to give a computer demonstration must bring a portable computer. No facilities can be made available by the school for such demonstrations.

Organisation

The scientific programme chairs are Dr. Maria Fox (maria.fox@dur.ac.uk, University of Durham, UK) and Professor Alfonso Gerevini (gerevini@ing.unibs.it, University of Brescia, Italy). The local arrangements chair is Dr. Yannis Dimopoulos (pss@cs.ucy.ac.cy, University of Cyprus, Cyprus).

The school consists of a three-day scientific programme and two social events. The first social event is the School Dinner, to be held on Friday 29th September. The second is the end-of-school Barbeque, to be held in the morning of Sunday 1st October. The registration fee includes the cost of the School Dinner, but the Barbeque must be paid for separately. Please confirm, when you register, whether you will be attending the Barbeque. Payment for the Barbeque will be made at the school.

Details of the technical programme can be found at:

http://prometeo.ing.unibs.it/sschool/

Notice and Dates

The school is aimed at PhD students and young academic researchers. In order to ensure the success of the school it has been decided to restrict registrations to a maximum of 40. The registration process is in two parts:

First, complete an application form giving your reasons for wishing to attend the school (a maximum of 1000 words) and making any appeal you intend to make for financial assistance. No fees are payable at this stage. Prospective participants should send an application to Maria Fox by July 14, 2000. Notification of successful application, and details of any financial assistance that has been awarded, will be posted by July 19 2000.
Second, complete a registration form and send it to the local arrangements secretary by July 30, 2000. On this form you will be asked to indicate whether you would like the barbeque. You will be asked to pay your registration fee at this point (please note that American Express cannot e accepted). You will also be asked to supply travel details so that the school can try to arrange transportation for you from the airport at Larnaca. Information about transportation arrangements from Larnaca will be posted on the web page of the school (see below). Please note that such arrangements cannot be guaranteed.

The forms can be found at http://prometeo.ing.unibs.it/sschool

Application forms (stage 1) should be sent to Maria Fox (maria.fox@dur.ac.uk).

Registration forms (stage 2) should be sent to the local organisation secretary (see form ).

Grants

Funding is available to help cover the travelling, registration and accommodation expenses of student participants. Please include your request for such funding within the application. Applicants will be notified about whether they have been successful in obtaining financial assistance at the end of the first stage of the registration process.

Accommodation and Registration fees

Accommodation is in the Coral Beach Hotel and is priced at 240 CYP (420 Euro). This covers costs for four nights in single room with breakfast. Participants are required to book their own accommodation with the hotel. Participants making their bookings before the end of July are guaranteed to secure accommodation in the hotel. After this time bookings will be subject to availability. Booking requests can be sent either by fax (+357-6-621742) or by email (coralsls@coral.com.cy) quoting Planning Summer School.

The Coral Beach Hotel is 20-25 minutes drive by taxi from Paphos airport (costs about 10 CYP). It is 1 hour and 40 minutes by taxi from Larnaca aiport (costs about 40 CYP).

The registration fee is 77 CYP (135 Euro) and includes lunches on the 28th, 29th and 30th September, refreshments on these days, the cost of the School Dinner and copies of the lecturers' teaching materials. The fee is non-refundable.

Further Information

More detailed information on courses and social arrangements of the school can be found at the URL: http://prometeo.ing.unibs.it/sschool The Cyprus Tourism Organisation web site can be found at: http://www.cyprustourism.com/

Requests for information about the school, grants and applications should be addressed to:
target_project@hotmail.com (registration enquiries)
maria.fox@dur.ac.uk or gerevini@ing.unibs.it (scientific programme enquiries)

Under the auspices of
PLANET - European Network of Excellence in AI Planning

Sponsored by

IJCAI - International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence

The Cyprus Development Bank