Confirmed Participants (in Alphabetical Order)

Wolfgang Bibel, TH Darmstadt, Germany
Wolfgang Bibel is Professor for Intellectics at the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University Darmstadt in Germany where he heads a group of more than ten researchers. He also maintains affiliations with the University of British Columbia as Adjunct Professor and with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research as Associate. In 1968 he received his Ph.D. degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. For many years he worked at the Technical University of Munich as a Senior Researcher, building up the AI group there. In 1987 he became a Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His more than one hundred and fifty publications range over various areas in artificial intelligence such as automated deduction, machine architecture for deductive systems, program synthesis, knowledge representation, but include also topics concerning the implications of AI technology for society. Dr. Bibel is Section Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, Associate Editor of the Journal for Symbolic Computation, Co-Editor of the AI book series of Vieweg Verlag, and on the board of more than ten further journals and series. From 1982 through 1986 he served as the first Chairman of ECCAI, the European AI organization. From 1987 through 1995 he was a Trustee of the International Joint Conferences for Artificial Intelligence, Inc., and held the Conference Chair of IJCAI'89. In 1990 he has been awarded the title of an AAAI Fellow by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) ``in Recognition of Significant Contributions to the Field of Artificial Intelligence''.

Susanne Biundo, German Research Center for AI (DFKI) Saarbrücken, Germany
Susanne Biundo received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe in 1989. Since then, she is working as a senior scientist at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). She has been leading two AI Planning projects there, devoted to plan-based help systems and to generic plan reasoning systems, respectively. Her current research interests focus on logic-based methods in planning and in program synthesis. Most recent work, done in cooperation with Werner Stephan, has been on temporal planning logics, and on the formal development of domain models for planning. Relevant papers can be found here .
Currently, Susanne Biundo is serving on the program committees of ECP-97 and IJCAI-97.

Amedeo Cesta, IP-CNR Rome, Italy
Amedeo Cesta received a "Laurea" degree in Electronic Engineering and a "Dottorato di Ricerca" in Computer Science at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1983 and 1992 respectively. During 1990 he was a visiting scholar at the Robotics Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University.
Since 1991 he has been a research scientist for the Italian National Research Council (Institute of Psychology (IP-CNR)) where he leads a project on artificial intelligence planning systems. His work focusses on the integration of planning and scheduling in practical architectures, the use of specialized constraint languages and, more generally, in investigating the gap between theory and practice in planning. His recent papers include the study of dynamic temporal networks and the DDL.1 plan-domains specification language. His research interests cover also multi-agent systems and human-computer interaction.

Thomas Dean, Brown University, USA
Thomas Dean received a B.A. in mathematics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute \& State University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in 1986. He is currently Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive and Linguistic Science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His general research interests include temporal and spatial reasoning, planning, robotics, learning, and probabilistic inference. His current research is concerned with theories of temporal and spatial inference for reasoning about actions and processes. Of particular interest are problems in which the notion of risk is complicated by there being limited time for both deliberation and action. Dean is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, and a member of the board of trustees for IJCAII. He was the recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, served as the program co-chair for the 1991 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and he will be the program chair for 1999 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence to held in in Stockholm. He is co-author of the Morgan-Kaufmann text entitled ``Planning and Control'' which ties together techniques from artificial intelligence, operations research, control theory, and the decision sciences. His latest book is ``Artificial Intelligence: Theory and Practice'' with James Allen and John Aloimonos and published by Benjamin Cummings.

Dietmar Dengler, German Research Center for AI (DFKI) Saarbrücken, Germany
Dietmar Dengler received his master's degree in computer science in 1989 from the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken. From 1990 so far he has been working at DFKI in the projects PHI (Plan-based Help Systems) and currently RAP (Reasoning About Plans) on deductive generation of customized plans.

Yannis Dimopoulos, University of Freiburg, Germany
Yannis Dimopoulos is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Freiburg. He received his Ph.D. from the Athens University of Economics in 1992. He has worked at the Max-Planck-Institut for Computer Science and the University of Cyprus. His main research interests are efficient reasoning, nonmonotonic reasoning (with emphasis on complexity and algorithms) and inductive logic programming.

Brian Drabble, University of Edinburgh, Great Britain

Ed Durfee, University of Michigan, USA
Edmund H. Durfee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where he conducts research in multiagent systems, real-time intelligent control, and cooperative problem solving for applications ranging from interacting unmanned vehicles to supporting human collaboration. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts in 1987, and was named a Presidential Young Investigator in 1991. Papers of particular relevance to this workshop can be found in the CIRCA project homepage.

Jürgen Eckerle, University of Freiburg, Germany
Jürgen Eckerle received his master's degree in mathematics in 1986 from University of Konstanz. From 1986 to 1991 he worked as a software engineer in computer industry. After his work in industry he was an assistant in the institute of computer science at University of Freiburg i.Br. His main topics in research was heuristic search especially efficient space-limited search. His Ph.D. is forthcoming. Currently he is working in a project of the German Research Foundation (DFG) which aims the creation of a heuristic workbench for state space problems as well as its application for the domain of telecommunication.

Kutluhan Erol, IAI Corporation, USA
Kutluhan Erol has received his BS degree in computer science from Bilkent University, Turkey in 1990, and he has received his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Maryland in 1995. He has done research in traditional AI planning systems and pioneered the analytical studies in hierarchical task network planning. He has several years of experience in building factory automation systems in industrial settings. Currently, he is employed as a senior scientist at Intelligent Automation Inc. leading several projects investigating multiagent systems in the context of planning and scheduling as it applies to factory automation and transportation logistics problems. Recent publications at ICSE-96, AAAI-96 and elsewhere can be accessed over the home page.

R. James Firby, University of Chicago, USA
Dr. Firby is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1989 and worked as Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory until 1990, when he moved to the University of Chicago. His primary research interest is the development of intelligent agents designed to work with humans in complex environments. The Reactive Action Package (RAP) system for representing and executing situated reactive plans was developed by Dr. Firby to allow a system in a dynamic, uncertain environment to cope effectively with changing task goals, situations, and knowledge. The RAP system is being used by a variety of researchers for task-level agent control, including MITRE Corporation and Johnson Space Center. It was recently chosen as the task level control component of the New Millenium high autonomy spacecraft testbed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In collaboration with Michael Swain, also at the Univeristy of Chicago, the RAP system is being applied to the development of a robot assistant that uses vision as its primary sensor.

Michael Georgeff,AAII, Australia
Michael Georgeff is the Director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII), one of Australia's foremost research and development organizations for advanced information technology. He is also a Professorial Associate at the University of Melbourne. Previously, he was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International and a member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. His major interests are in the design of software systems suited to uncertain, dynamic environments; distributed real-time systems; planning and simulation; and the philosophy and theory of rational computational ``agents.'' He has published over 80 major articles, books, and book chapters in these areas. He is on the editorial board of a number of major AI journals, including the International Journal of Computational Intelligence, the Journal of Logic and Computation, the Journal of AI Research, the International Journal of Expert Systems, and the International Journal of Applied Intelligence. Michael Georgeff is a trustee of the Board of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Alfonso Gerevini, University of Brescia, Italy
Alfonso Gerevini is an assistant professor for Information Processing Systems at the University of Brescia, Italy. From 1988 to 1995 he worked as a research scientist at IRST (Trento, Itay). Since 1992 he has been spending part of his time at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Rochester as a visiting research associate. His research activity focuses on temporal reasoning, constraint-based reasoning, planning, and reasoning about actions. He has published several papers on these topics in major AI journals (e.g., AIJ-94/95, CIJ-95, JAIR-96) and conferences (e.g., IJCAI-93, KR&R-94, AIPS-96). In his recent work on planning, conducted jointly with Len Schubert, he proposed some domain-independent techniques for search control and pruning in non-linear planning, which bring well-founded planning closer to practicality. His current interests in the area of planning include methods for search control and pruning, constraint representation and reasoning for planning, temporal reasoning for planning, disjunctive reasoning in planning, plan modification and merging. Papers of particular relevance for this workshops are: Accelerating Partial-Order Planners: Some Techniques for Effective Search Control and Pruning , A. Gerevini and L.K. Schubert, JAIR, 6, Sep. 1996; "Computing Parameter Domains as an Aid to Planning", A. Gerevini and L.K. Schubert, Proc. of AIPS-96.

Malik Ghallab, LAAS, France
Malik Ghallab is Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is head of the Robotics and AI research group at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse. His main interests are at the intersection of robotics and AI, that is in the robust integration of perception, action and reasoning capabilities within autonomous robots. His group is pursuing both formal and experimental work within several large mobile robot projects, including a multi-robot cooperation project for structured environments (the HILARE family of robots), and an exploration robot project for unstructured environments (the ADAM and LAMA robots). He contributed to topics such as object recognition, scene interpretation, heuristics search, pattern matching and unification algorithms, knowledge compiling for real-time synchronous systems, temporal planning and supervision systems. His work on the later topic has been focused for the last 8 years on the development of the IxTeT planner and chronicle recognition system, which has been applied to robotics as well as to scheduling and process supervision. Malik Ghallab contributed to several books and articles. He served as co-chief editor for the Revue d'Intelligence Artificielle for 7 years, he is a member of several editorial boards, and chaired the Program Committee of several conferences, including recently EWSP'95 and RFIA'96. He was the director of the French AI natinal program from 90 to 93.

James Hendler, University of Maryland, USA
Jim Hendler is an associate professor and head of the Advanced Information Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland, where he has worked since January, 1986. He is the author or editor of 4 AI-related books including two on planning, and is currently co-authoring a planning text with Drew McDermott. His interest areas include reactive/dynamic planning, case-based planning, and general studies on understanding and improving the performance of planners. Pointer to Papers on HTN, Real-time Planning, and others.

Joachim Hertzberg, German National Research Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (GMD), Germany
Joachim Hertzberg is a senior researcher at GMD. He has worked at ICSI Berkeley as a guest researcher in 1993, was a substitute full professor at the University of Dortmund in 1993/94, and is currently a visiting lecturer at the Computer Science Department of the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His areas of scientific interest and research are Artificial Intelligence, action planning, temporal reasoning, logical reasoning about action and change, and constraint-based reasoning. Currently he is working in robot control and has conducted the study LAOKOON, an investigation into the feasibility of adaptive, autonomous cooperating robot platforms for the inspection and maintenance of sewerage systems. He has served as the speaker of the SIG "Planen und Konfigurieren" of the German Society for Computer Science (1989-1993), organized and chaired the first European Workshop on Planning (EWSP-91), and the first national German workshops on planning and configuration (PuK-87 and later ones). He was a also PC member of numerous conferences, such as AIPS.

Laurie Ihrig, Arizona State University, USA
Laurie Ihrig received her PhD from Arizona State University in May, 1996, under the direction of Subbarao Kambhampati. Since then she has been working as a Faculty Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State. Her research focuses on learning methods for planning. She is the primary architect of the case-based planner, DerSNLP (Derivational Systematic NonLinear Planner) which performs derivational replay within the partial-order planner, SNLP. Her thesis work has appeared in the proceedings of AAAI-94 and AAAI-96. She also has a strong interest and has authored papers in machine learning, analogical reasoning, and human learning.

Toru Ishida, Kyoto University, Japan
Toru Ishida is a professor of Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. From 1978 to 1993, he was a research scientist of NTT Laboratories. He has been working on ``parallel, distributed and multiagent production systems'' from 1983. He first proposed parallel rule firing, and extended it to distributed rule firing. Organizational self-design was then introduced into distributed production systems for increasing adaptiveness. From 1990, he started working on ``realtime search for learning autonomous agents.'' Again, organizational adaptation became a central issue in controlling multiple problem solving agents. Pointers to relevant papers in IEEE TKDE and IEEE PAMI.

Craig Knoblock, University of Southern California, USA
Craig Knoblock is a Senior Research Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute and a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse University in 1984, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988 and 1991. His current research interests are on information gathering and integration, automated planning, machine learning, knowledge discovery, and knowledge representation. For the last five years he was been working on the problem of information integration from heterogeneous data sources. He is one of the primary architects of the SIMS information mediator, which builds on work in planning, machine learning, and knowledge representation. Pointer to papers in AIJ-94 AIJ-95 IJCAI-95.

Jana Koehler,University of Freiburg, Germany
Jana Koehler is an assistant professor for computer science at the university of Freiburg. Previously she has been working as a research scientist at DFKI from 1990 to 1995 in a project on plan-based help systems. In 1996 she spent one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley where she was working on knowledge representation techniques. In her work on planning conducted at DFKI she investigated how reuse and modification of plans can help in speeding up planning systems. The results reported in these papers range from specific techniques for complex plans and deductive planners to very general complexity-based studies concerning all linear and non-linear planning systems. She was the recipient of the AKI Dissertational Award 1995 and the Digital Equipment Prize 1994. She is also serving as a programme committee member of ECP-97, the European Conference on Planning.

Richard Korf, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Richard Korf is a Professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.S. from M.I.T. in 1977, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 and 1983, respectively, all in computer science. From 1983 to 1985, he served as Herbert M. Singer Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research is in the areas of problem solving, planning, and heuristic search in artificial intelligence. He is the author of "Learning to Solve Problems by Searching for Macro-Operators" (Pitman, 1985). He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Intelligence, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Korf is the recipient of a 1985 IBM Faculty Development Award, a 1986 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the first UCLA Computer Science Department Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989, and the UCLA Engineering School First Annual Student's Choice Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1994.

Jan Karel Lenstra, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
Jan Karel Lenstra spent twenty years at the CWI in Amsterdam and is professor of optimization and planning at Eindhoven University of Technology since 1989. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, in particular complexity, approximation algorithms, routing, and scheduling. He has been chairman of the Mathemathical Programming Society and holds a number of editorial positions, including the editorship of Mathematics of Operations Research.

Hans Jakob Luethi, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland
Doctorate degree in mathematics at ETH Zurich. Lecturer in operation research at ETH, visiting professor at Pontificia Universidade Catolica, Brazil, Rensselare Polytechnic Institute Try, NY and Center of OR at MIT. Head of several international research projects in industrial and organizational engineering as a partner in a consulting firm, 1993 joining the ETH as professor of Operations Research and director of the institute of Operations Research at ETH Zurich. His main research area are besides mathematics of operations research, the study of "intelligence" in decision support in logistics and operational management.

Drew McDermott, Yale University, USA

Erica Melis, University Saarbrücken, Germany
Erica Melis is a senior research scientist at the University of Saarbrucken, Computer Science Department. She is currently working in the project OMEGA that is centered around a mathematical proof assistant. Her current reseach interest is mainly in proof planning and theorem proving by analogy. In 1993/94 she was a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and in 1994/95 she spent a year as a HC&M research fellow at the AI department at the University of Edinburgh. Pointer to relevant papers here.

Dana Nau, University of Maryland, USA
Dana Nau is a professor at the University of Maryland, in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Systems Research. His research interests include AI planning and searching, and computer-integrated design and manufacturing. Dr. Nau received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1979, where he was an NSF graduate fellow. He has more than 150 technical publications; for recent papers see . He has received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, the ISR Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty award, and several ``best paper'' awards. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Bernhard Nebel, University of Freiburg, Germany
Bernhard Nebel is a professor at Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg and head of the research group on Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. He received a Diploma in Computer Science (Dipl.-Inform.) from the University of Hamburg in 1980 and his Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the University of Saarland in 1989. Between 1982 and 1993 he worked in different AI projects at the University of Hamburg, the Technical University of Berlin, ISI/USC, IBM Germany, and the German Research Center for AI (DFKI). From 1993 to 1996 he held an Associate Professor position at the Computer Science Department of the University of Ulm. His research area is Knowledge representation and reasoning, in particular description logics, temporal and spatial reasoning, constraint-based reasoning, plan-related reasoning, and belief revision with an emphasis on computational complexity and algorithms. Some papers relevant for the workshop can be found here. Among other professional services, Bernhard Nebel is in on the editorial board of the "Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research", served as the program co-chair for the 1992 International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, as the program co-chair for the 1994 German Annual Conference on AI, and he is tutorial chair of the 1997 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and general chair of the 1997 Annual German AI Conference.

Bart Selman, ATT Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, USA

Werner Stephan, German Research Center for AI (DFKI), Germany
Werner Stephan is a senior scientist at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He received both his Ph.D. and Habilitation in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe in 1981 and 1989. He led several projects on formal program verification and was a substitute full professor at the universities of Karlsruhe and Mannheim. At DFKI, he is heading the research group Formal Verification and Program Development . He is also in charge of a German national consortium from academia and industry which works on the application of formal program development methods in industrial contexts. His current research is devoted to temporal logics of actions and to search control in deductive systems. His recent work in planning has been on temporal planning logics and on formal domain model development, in cooperation with Susanne Biundo. Relevant papers can be found here .

Paolo Traverso, IRST, Italy
Paolo Traverso is a senior researcher at IRST (Institute for Scientific and Technological Research), Trento, Italy. His main research interests are in Planning and Formal Methods for Software Engineering. His research in Planning focuses on reactive planning, embedded planners and the integration of action, perception and reasoning. He has been leading the development of a planner for an experimental large-scale and real-world application at IRST where a planning system has been integrated with a reactive system which controls a robot navigating in an in-door environment. Most recent work has been on temporal reasoning, theories of actions and planning search techniques. He has been in the organizing committee of the AAAI workshop on ``Theories of action, Planning and Control: Bridging the gap" and he is serving on the program committee of ECP-97 and as a referee for IJCAI-97.

Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Manuela M. Veloso is Finmeccanica Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1992. Dr. Veloso's main research interest consists of the development of experience-based intelligent agents that combine high-level planning, low-level execution, and learning. She investigates different planning algorithms, analogical/case-based reasoning learning strategies, and the integration of analytical and inductive learning methods applied to planning. She also researches on methods in which perception and learning are combined to address jointly high-level and low-level reasoning tasks. Dr. Veloso is currently also interested in strategy planning and learning in the context of multiple experience-based agents, in collaborative and adversarial environments, such as robotic soccer. She is the author of a book on "Planning and Analogical Reasoning."

David Wilkins, SRI International, USA
Dr. Wilkins received his B.S. from Iowa State University in 1972, and his M.Sc. from the University of Essex in 1973, writing a thesis on non-clausal theorem proving. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979; his thesis work centered on a chess program that used knowledge to replace and control search. Dr. Wilkins has since been at the SRI International AI Center where he is currently a Senior Computer Scientist and has been a Visiting Scholar at both Stanford University and Melbourne University. He was instrumental in initiating the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute and published a book entitled Practical Planning: Extending the Classical AI Planning Paradigm. His research has centered on planning and reasoning about actions, knowledge representation, and design and implementation of artificial intelligence systems, including SIPE-2, a state-of-the-art AI planner. Recently, Dr. Wilkins led a project to develop Cypress, a system for creating taskable, reactive agents. Cypress integrated AI technologies in planning and reactive control to provide automated asyhnchronus dynamic replanning. Cypress was developed and applied to military operations planning as part of the ARPA/RL Planning Initiative. SIPE-2 was recently used to plan military air campaigns in the fourth Integrated Feasibility Demonstration of the ARPA/RL Planning Initiative.