Further Awards or Honours

The following list is ordered by year, most recent first.

  • Winner of five IPC 2023 HTN Planning Tracks:

    • Winner of the Partial-Order (PO) Agile and Satisficing tracks (we did not participate in the optimal track),
    • Winner of the Total-Order (TO) Agile, Satisficing, and Optimal tracks

    In more detail: I participated with two planners:

    • One is a script that turns a PO HTN problem into a TO problem and then uses existing TO planners. (So in a sense it's really those TO planners from the literature that won! We just observed that many PO problems can be turned into TO problems without sacrificing solvability.) The technique is, so far, only published at the PuK workshop 2023. The participating "script" is by Ying Wu, Conny Olz, Songtuan Lin, and Pascal Bercher.
    • The winning TO planner is by Conny Olz, Daniel Höller, and Pascal Bercher. One of its core contributions is published at SoCS 2023 (by Conny and me), though we combined them with new techniques by Daniel Höller, not yet published.

  • Invited Talk at AAAI 2021

    in their New Faculty Highlights Invited Speaker Program, which highligts AI researchers who have just begun careers as new faculty members (or the equivalent in industry). I presented an overview of my work until then. Video presentation. List of all presentations by all speakers

  • Cooperation Award: Science – Economy 2019

    The research project Do it yourself, but not alone: Companion-Technology for Home Improvement that was coordinated by me for its entire runtime from 2016 to 2019 won Ulm University's Cooperation Award: Science – Economy 2019 (German: Kooperationspreis: Wissenschaft – Wirtschaft 2019).

  • ICAPS 2019 Best Dissertation Award

    For my dissertation Hybrid Planning -- From Theory to Practice. Award description from the ICAPS website:

    The dissertation stands out by covering a lot of ground:

    • It formalises and develops planning with hierarchical task networks (HTNs) toward a hybrid formalism that includes partial-order causal link planning;
    • it presents complexity results for the resulting problem classes;
    • it develops heuristics for hybrid planning;
    • it describes the implementation of a hybrid planner and its integration into a companion device that assists in the set-up of a home theater system; and
    • it performs a user study to evaluate the system. The dissertation also rekindled interest in HTN planning by putting it on firm formal ground and connecting it to recent developments in classical planning.

  • Nomination (Shortlisting) for the GI Best Dissertation Award 2017

    Ulm University nominated my dissertation for the GI Best Dissertation Award 2017, a national award (joint with the GI Germany, Switzerland, and Austria) for the best dissertation in the field of Computer Science. The GI (Gesellschaft für Informatik, eng: Society for Computer Science) encourages nominations that make progress in the field of Computer Science or related practical-oriented areas; they should further have some impact on the today's society. The final winners were announced here. My 10-page dissertation abstract (in German), as well as all other nominated dissertations, are published in the Proceedings "Ausgezeichnete Informatikdissertationen" (eng: Awarded Computer Science Dissertations).

  • Paper Presentation at Press Conference of AAAI 2015

    I was presenting my system demo paper A Planning-based Assistance System for Setting Up a Home Theater (AAAI 2015) at a press conference that was held during the AAAI conference 2015. They selected five papers that are of interest to the public due to their relevance for today's society.