The project supports the third in an international symposium series on the topic of combinatorial search. The intellectual merit of this project stems from the sharing of new results, ideas, and problems across the many areas in AI, robotics and other fields where combinatorial search is used. Broad impact comes not only from this intermixing but from having a single locus of activity for efforts in combinatorial search, one that we expect to become known in the wider community as the place to look when one wants a snapshot of the latest developments in the area. The 2010 symposium is being held on July 8-10, 2010, in the vicinity of and just prior to the AAAI-10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. NSF funding supports authors of oral and poster presentations, as well as invited speakers.
This grant was used to support two scientific meetings in the general area of artificial intelligence within the broader discipline of computer science. The meeting is called the, "International Sympsosium on Combinatorial Search. The first meeting was held in Stone Mountain, just outside of Atlanta Georgia, from July 8 to 10, 2010, and the second was held at Castell de Cardoma, near Barcelona Spain, from July 15 to 16, 2011. Each were attended by about 40 participants. The funds were used primarily to support the travel costs of graduate students and invited speakers. Each symposia published proceedings that include the papers that were presented. They can be obtaimed from the internet at the following addresses: www.aaai.org/Press/Proceedings/socs10/php, and www.aaai.org/Press/Proceedings/socs11/php. The subject matter of these meetings is called, "combinatorial search". It is concerned with programming computers to solve problems that require systematic exploration of a large number of different possible solutions. A simple example of such a problem is finding a shortest path in a network of roads to drive from one location to another. More complex examples include programming a computer to solve scheduling problems, such as allocating a number of jobs that have different running times on different machines so that all the jobs are completed as soon as possible.
