This tutorial will be targeted to theorists and practitioners interested in understanding the current-state of the art in planning on the Web. The tutorial will be accessible to anyone with a general knowledge of AI planning. By the end of the tutorial, the participants will have a solid grounding in the state of the art and a familiarity with the current systems for web-based planning.
Craig Knoblock received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1991 and joined University of Southern California that year. He is currently a Senior Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Associate Professor in Computer Science. His current research interests include information agents, information integration, automated planning, and machine learning. He leads the Information Agents Research Group, which is addressing the problems of building agents for integrating and managing web-based information sources.
He has published over 100 articles, book chapters, and conference papers in planning, machine learning and information integration, as well as the book Generating Abstraction Hierarchies: An Automated Approach to Reducing Search in Planning (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). He served on the Senior Program Committee of the 1997, 1998, and 2000 National Artificial Intelligence Conferences. He also co-chaired the 1998 AAAI Workshop on AI and Information Integration and was one of the organizers of the 1999 IJCAI Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration, and was program co-chair for the 2000 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling. He is currently on the AAAI Executive Council and is Treasurer for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. He also co-chaired the 2003 IJCAI Workshop on Information Integration on the Web.
Professor Knoblock has taught a number of courses and tutorials over the years on planning and information integration. For the last two years he has taught a graduate level course on Information Integration on the Web. He taught a tutorial at AAAI 2002 on Information Integration on the Web and he taught a course on Planning for the Web at the 2002 Planet Summer School on AI Planning.
José Luis Ambite is a Senior Research Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 1998. His Ph.D. dissertation focused in general plan optimization techniques based on plan rewriting, which were applied to query optimization in the SIMS and Ariadne mediator systems as a special case. His research interests include information integration, automated planning, databases, and knowledge representation. His current focus is on automatic web service composition, a problem that combines aspects of planning and information integration.
Dr. Ambite has published extensively on planning and information integration. He co-chairs the Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Web and Grid Services at ICAPS-2004, and organized the Workshop on Planning for Web Services at ICAPS-2003 . He has served as program committee member or reviewer for numerous conferences, including ICAPS (2004, 2003), the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Systems (AIPS 2000, 1998), and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2003, 2001, 1999). He has taught the graduate AI planning course at the USC Computer Science Department.