Robert Craig

Robert Craig Holte - University of Alberta, Canada

Professor Robert Holte of the Computing Science Department at the University of Alberta (Canada) is a former editor-in-chief of the journal "Machine Learning" and program co-chair of AAAI (2007). He was the co-founder and former director of the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning (AICML, now known as Amii, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute). His current research is on single-agent heuristic search, with seminal contributions on bidirectional search, methods for predicting the run-time of a search algorithm, and the use of machine learning to create search heuristics. Professor Holte was elected a Fellow of the AAAI in 2011.

Research stay at UC3M: DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Project:

During my visit to the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, I will collabo-
rate with members of its Planning and Learning Group (PLG), particularly Professors Carlos Linares Lopez and Daniel Borrajo Millan. Our research investigates heuristic search methods for automated planning. One of the main topics we will study during this visit is bidirectional search. Colleagues and I have made substantial breakthroughs on this topic lately, producing algorithms with important properties and some theoretical understanding of bidirectional search algorithms in general. But many practical and theoretical questions remain open and they will be addressed with the help of PLG's expertise. An important goal of this visit is to identify new col-
laborative projects. With this in mind, we will explore contributions I can make on projects currently being pursued by the PLG, such as using machine learning to speed up planning, non-traditional planning tasks, and planning applications.