Research Interests

I am almost exclusively working in automated planning, one of the main disciplines of Artificial Intelligence.

I am primarily interested in Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, which is a hierarchical approach to planning, where tasks are refined step-wise until a primitive executable plan is obtained. Closely related is the problem class of HTN planning with task insertion (TIHTN planning), where we are also allowed to insert actions arbitrarily thus combining HTN planning with classical planning. (I also created a website on hierarchical planning.)

I'm also interested in partial order causal link (POCL) planning, a planning approach based on search in the space of plans. Here, reasoning about partially ordered actions become of major importance.

More specifically, I am interested in:

  • Computational Complexity Investigations
  • Expressivity Investigations and Problem Compilations
  • Design of Novel Algorithms and Heuristics
  • Verification of Plans and Models
  • Modeling Assistance (creating tools so that "beginners" get guided through the process of creating new models)
  • Planning under Uncertainty
  • Planning with time
  • Lifted planning, i.e., planning without prior instantiation of all variables to available constants

If you are more interested in AI planning,you can check out my reading recommendations on my page with resources for students.

Target Conferences for mostly Symbolic AI

This section might be most useful for myself and my PhD students.

Below, I list the "most fitting" conferences where I or my PhD students either usually publish, or could publish. That is, all those conferences focus on planning or more generally symbolic AI, including other forms of combinatorial optimization like SAT solving, ILPs, and of course many more (in contrast to AI conferences that focus on Machine Learning or robotics, for example, which my group is not working on).

The conferences are more or less ordered by importance (for my team).

A* conferences

  • AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence)
  • IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
  • ICAPS (International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling)
  • KR (International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning)
  • AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)

A conferences

  • ECAI (European Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
  • JELIA (European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence)
  • UAI (Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence)
  • CP (International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming)
  • ICLP (International Conference on Logic Programming)

B conferences

  • SoCS (Symposium on Combinatorial Search)
    Officially, this conference is (sadly) only ranked B, but it's considered A by most people in our community
  • PRICAI (Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence)
  • ICTAI (International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence)
  • ICAART (International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence)

Target Conferences for LLM-related work

Since I've very recently started to use LLMs in my research (specifically for model creation or model repair), I list conferences where that work might be submitted to also. I list them separately since these conferences usually have a completely different focus from the ones listed above (yet, LLM-related work can also be published at the above conferences).

A* conferences

  • NeurIPS (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems)
  • ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning)

B conferences

  • COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics)