Further Awards or Honours

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

• Completed the Baden-Württemberg-Zertifikat Hochschuldidaktik (English: "Baden-Württemberg Certificate for Teaching and Learning at University Level"). This is technically not an Award, but due to the large time investments (200 working units, 45 minutes each), I list it here anyways. For more details, check out my page about teaching.

• ANU CSS Excellence in Supervision Award 2025

  Recognises staff who provide outstanding guidance, mentorship, and support to students undertaking research or coursework projects.

  This award was given in mid 2026 for the year 2025 by the College of Systems and Society (CSS), which consists of six schools. I greatly appreciate my PhD students for nominating me! :)

• Awarded AAAI Senior Member status (2026):

  The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is the world's leading scientific society for AI research. The Senior Member distinction is granted to long-standing members who have made significant contributions to the field of AI through research, teaching, and professional service. It recognizes a sustained record of excellence and leadership within the international AI community. Each year, up to a maximum of 25 AAAI members are awarded this status, though only 8 were selected on average between this award's foundation in 2011 and 2026, when I got selected. (List of all Members; 2026 list will be made public late January.)

• 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 highlights 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. The assistant published in that paper is accompanied by a professionally produced video, coordinated by me:

Awards Won by Students I Have Supervised

First, a disclaimer: These awards are obviously not mine, they are 100% the achievement by the people who won them! But just like every parent is proud of the achievements of their kids, so am I. :)

Inclusion and exclusion criteria:

• I only list students I have supervised in one way or another.
• I only list major awards by them like University Medals or Best Dissertation Awards.
• I do not list Best (Student) Paper awards, since those are already listed in my list of Best paper awards.

List of students and their achievements:

• Hadyn Tang: ANU University Medal 2025
  He wrote his Honours thesis under my supervision, and the outcome of his thesis was certainly a strong contributing factor to him winning that award. (His work was also published at AAAI 2026; further results are still pending publication.)
• Dillon Chen: ANU University Medal 2023
  I note that Dillon did not write his Honours thesis with me (that's important since that thesis is one of the main reasons for nomination/winning). However, I supervised a 6 pt project and later a 10 week summer internship. As a consequence, we published two ICAPS papers (he was lead in both), which both won the Best Student Paper Award -- so, this most likely contributed.
• Conny Olz: summa cum laude (2023)
  I co-supervised her PhD thesis at Ulm University, where she received the highest grade summa cum laude ("with distinction"). At Ulm, this requires that there are three reviewers, not just two as is the default, one of which needs to be external, and that the examination committee reach a unanimous decision.

Beyond all these, if you'd like to see the publication successes of undergraduate students I supervised, check out my supervision page.