Search is one of the few areas of artificial intelligence (and beyond) that
lack their own conference. The First International Symposium on Search (SoCS 2008), organized as a AAAI-08 workshop,
therefore brought together researchers interested in this topic to share their
ideas and disseminate their latest research results. We expect this symposium
to be a recurrent event. The first symposium focused on finding common ground
between search techniques used in artificial intelligence and robotics.
Heuristic search and related algorithms are currently very active areas of
research. For example, researchers investigate how to search in real-time, how
to search with limited (possibly external) memory, how to search in parallel
on several processors, how to solve sequences of similar search problems
faster than with isolated searches, how to improve the runtime of the searches
via randomization or learning techniques, how to discretize continuous state
spaces, how to trade-off between the runtime and memory consumption of the
search and the resulting solution quality, how to select between different
search strategies, and how to focus the searches with sophisticated heuristics
such as pattern databases. Their results are published in different
conferences such as IJCAI, AAAI, ICAPS, NIPS, ICRA, and IROS. The First
International Symposium on Search brought these researchers together to
exchange their ideas, cross-fertilize the field and combine various search
techniques that originated in different research communities.
The two-day symposium had more than 35 attendees, in part thanks to generous support from NSF for student participation. It featured an overview that highlighted the similarities and differences of search in artificial intelligence and robotics and 3 invited talks (by Oliver Brock, Malte Helmert and Maxim Likachev) on "Solving Hard Planning Problems in Robotics with Simple A*-like Searches", "Automatically Deriving Abstraction Heuristics" and "Search in Embodied Artificial Intelligence and Computational Biology."
The 15 oral presentations and more than 12 posters in a lively poster session
displayed the diversity of research on search and its applications, covering
topics such as abstraction, inconsistent heuristics, bounded sub-optimality,
performance prediction, learning, symmetry, real-time search, moving-target
search, connections to probabilistic reasoning and applications to robotics,
machine learning, and diagnosis. One of the highlights of the symposium were
presentations on the use of heuristic search in the first- and second-place
vehicles participating in the DARPA Urban Challenge.
Organizers
- David Furcy, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh
- Sven Koenig, University of Southern California
- Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire
- Rong Zhou, Palo Alto Research Center
Program Committee
- Chris Beck, University of Toronto
- Blai Bonet, Universidad Simón Bolívar
- Stefan Edelkamp, University of Dortmund
- Susan Epstein, Hunter College
- Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University
- David Furcy, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh
- David Ferguson, Carnegie Mellon University
- Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Youssef Hamadi, Microsoft
- Eric Hansen, Mississippi State University
- Patrik Haslum, NICTA
- Robert Holte, University of Alberta
- Lydia Kavraki, Rice University
- Sven Koenig, University of Southern California
- Richard Korf, University of California at Berkeley
- James Kuffner, Carnegie Mellon University
- Maxim Lihkachev, University of Pennsylvania
- Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire
- Jonathan Schaeffer, University of Alberta
- Bart Selman, Cornell University
- Shlomo Zilberstein, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
- Toby Walsh, NICTA
- Weixiong Zhang, Washington University in St. Louis
- Rong Zhou, Palo Alto Research Center
Additional Information is contained on the webpage of SOCS-08.