Request for Comments and Participation

As many of you know this year IJCAI is experimenting with "Challenge papers" (a detailed description of the motivation behind which can be found here) Briefly, a challenge is expected to instigate a narrowly focused program of research culminating in papers submitted to the following IJCAI that address the technical challenge and summarize progress. I submitted one of the accepted papers titled "Challenges in bridging plan synthesis paradigms" and it explores the question of whether or not the body of work underlying traditional refinement planning techniques can play a useful role given the current dominance of methods that compile planning problems into CSP instances. I sketch a generalized view of refinement planning that encompasses both types of planning techniques, and suggest several interesting problems that can be tackled within that framework. A draft of this paper is available at http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/challenge.html

The reason I am bringing this all up is I am interested in gathering a seed group of people who might be interested in tackling these problems or variants, and solicit their comments on the current version. If there is sufficient interest, I could start a small mailing list for us interested folks to exchange information on the topic.

I am also interested in hearing from anyone who might be interested in the general area but would like to see different or more broader phrasing of some of the challenges. This is one of the reasons I am sending this message out early rather than wait till the formal presentation at IJCAI.


Subbarao Kambhampati
Last modified: Tue Apr 29 09:57:39 MST