This award supports participation of US-based graduate student researchers in the 2012 Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2012) to be held July 19-21, 2012 in Niagara Falls, Canada, just prior to the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) to be held July 22-26 in Toronto. The funds will help defray the travel, lodging, and registration costs for 13 graduate students as well as two invited speakers. SoCS 2012 will bring together researchers in all aspects of heuristic search and combinatorial optimization and its use in a broad range of areas in AI including core topics of Robust Intelligence like robotics, planning, constraint programming, and in other areas of interest across IIS like bioinformatics. One of the oldest subareas of research in AI, search continues to grow. Its advances include real-time search, parallel search, search using external memory, methods for using inconsistent heuristics, etc. Today it is central to solving problems in areas as diverse as optimal alignment of DNA sequences and real-time navigation. A special focus of SoCS 2012 is path-planning, which is important in robotics and computational biology. SoCS 2012 will include a new grid-based path planning competition.
This grant was used to support a scientific conference called the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS-2012) that was held in Niagara Falls, Canada from July 19 to July 21, 2012. This was the fifth such conference in this series. 56 people attended the symposium, of which about half were graduate students, and 27 scientific papers were presented, and also published as a book. Combinatorial seach is a subfield of artificial intelligence, which is a subfield of computer science. In general, combinatorial search is concerned with writing computer programs that solve problems by searching through a large number of potential solutions, looking for a best solution. A good example of a practical application of this research area is a vehicle navigation system that can plan a path in a network of roads from the current location to a desired destination. The funding was used primarily to support the travel of thirteen U.S.-based graduate students to attend the symposium, present their research results, and interact with each other and with more senior researchers in the field. In addition, the funding was used to support the travel expenses of two invited speakers. Thus, the primary purpose of the grant was to help train the next generation of computer scientists and engineers.
