Invitation to Will Cushing's PhD Defense: "When is Temporal Planning Really Temporal?"

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

Dear all:

 You are cordially invited to the Ph.D. defense of  Will Cushing at 10AM tomorrow (Friday). Will Cushing received his Bachelors in CS from our  program. 

Will's work on temporal planning changed the way temporal planning competitions are run in automated planning, and  garnered over 100 citations to-date. 

A draft of his 433-page dissertation can be accessed at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ebv3nqk6iiq1qgx/dissertation.pdf   

Regards

Rao

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Monica Dugan <Monica.Dugan@asu.edu>
Date: Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:35 PM
Subject: Ph.D Thesis/Dissertation Defense Announcement: "When is Temporal Planning Really Temporal?" by William Cushing
To:
Cc: "William Cushing (Student)" <wcushing@asu.edu>

PhD in Computer Science

School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering

 

Title:

When is Temporal Planning Really Temporal?

 

Ph.D. Defense:

William Cushing

 

Friday, November 16^, 2012 - 10:00 am

BYENG 528

 

Committee:

Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati (Chair)

Prof. Chitta Baral

Prof. Hasan Davalcu

Dr. David E. Smith

Prof. Daniel S. Weld

 

Dissertation Abstract

 The simplest temporal extensions of Classical Planners have swept clean the Temporal Planning tracks of the International Planning Competitions, from their inception in 2002 through today. As a practical matter the data is great news. We should always celebrate being able to perform well on hard problems by using only simple-minded approaches. To be realistic though: the result is too good to be true.  Broadly speaking, my aim is to separate the fact from the fiction.

In other words, the aim is to better understand the computational relationship, in theory and practice, between Classical and Temporal Planning. A key notion is that, while theoretical expressiveness and practical efficiency are generally opposed, there are opportunities for exceptions. Such exceptions are well worth discovering and documenting in detail. To be more specific, the thesis I defend is as follows.

We should understand the precise interpretation of concurrency as a crucial feature separating the more from less expressive forms of Temporal Planning.  Especially I call attention to three general approaches to formalizing: in Sequential Planning concurrency is forbidden, in Conservative Temporal Planning concurrency is strictly optional, and in Interleaved Temporal Planning concurrency is requirable.