This award gives travel, housing, and registration-cost support to selected doctoral students from U.S. universities for their participation in the Doctoral Consortium of the 20th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-10) held May 13 in Toronto, Canada. ICAPS is the premier conference for research in artificial intelligence planning and scheduling, with relevance to a wide variety of applications such as software engineering, manufacturing, transportation, and robotics. The ICAPS-10 Doctoral Consortium includes a poster session, where students present their research, and a mentoring program that pairs senior scientists with doctoral students.
ICAPS-10 Doctoral Consortium Travel Awards Daniel L. Bryce Project Outcomes This project supported nine doctoral students from US universities to attend the Doctoral Consortium (DC) at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), held in Toronto, Canada on May 13, 2010. The event included a total of twenty-five students from around the world, including those from US institutions. The funds enabled the students, which would have otherwise had financial difficulty, to attend the DC. The objective of the annual DC is to provide a forum where doctoral students, in any phase of their training, can receive career and research advice from peers and mentors, present preliminary results and plans for their dissertations, and build professional relationships. A popular component of past ICAPS DCs, that was included, is the formation of several small focus groups where students and assigned mentors meet to discuss each student’s dissertation topic. To broaden their feedback, students also prepared posters that they presented during a social event open to the entire ICAPS conference. To support career development, two invited speakers addressed the students: Derek Long of the University of Strathclyde (UK) spoke on "How to keep your advisor on a tight leash" and Wheeler Ruml of the University of New Hampshire spoke on "Job Hunting". The organizers also arranged a group through LinkedIn to enable extended interactions between the participants. Intellectual Merit The intellectual merit of the activity was to contribute to the professional development of young researchers through interaction with senior researchers in their field and to make connections with their peers that should support their future careers. Broader Impacts The broader impacts of the project were to help disseminate and shape the research of young scientists in the field of automated planning and scheduling, as well as improve the student retention within the field.
