The AAAI 2006 workshop on
Learning for Search
Sunday July 16, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts

News

Workshop Description

Heuristic search is among the most widely used techniques in AI. In its different varieties, tree-based search and local search, it provides the core engine for applications as diverse as planning, parsing, and protein folding. One of the most promising avenues for developing improved search techniques is to integrate learning components that can adaptively guide the search.
Many disparate techniques have arisen in recent years that exploit learning to improve search and problem-solving. These techniques can be off-line or on-line, based on hard constraints or probabilistic biases, and applied to tree-structured or local search. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the various subcommunities where such methods have arisen in order to learn from each other, develop common understandings, and inspire new algorithms and approaches.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

This one day workshop is organised by Wheeler Ruml and Frank Hutter.

Important dates

Submission procedure

We ask authors to submit technical papers either in Postscript or PDF. Papers should be in AAAI conference style (formatting instructions available at: http://aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php) and are encouraged to be 6 pages in length with a maximum of 8 pages Please submit papers via email to lfs06submissions@parc.com

Please note that all submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers, and that low-quality or off-topic papers will not be accepted.
Also note that all workshop participants must register for the main AAAI-06 conference

Attendance

Authors of accepted papers will automatically be invited. Other invitations will be sent on a personal/request basis.

Format

Due to the large number of submissions we will have a poster session next to a number of short talks. See the schedule for details.

Contact information

Wheeler Ruml Palo Alto Research Center, Room 2546 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, CA 94304-1314 650-812-4329 650-812-4334 (shared fax, please use a cover page)

Frank Hutter University of British Columbia 2366 Main Mall Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Y4 Canada 778-229-7936 (cell phone) 604-822-6625 (LCI lab) 604-822-5485 (shared fax, please use a cover page)

Program Committee

• Tom Carchrae, Cork Constraint Computation Center (4C), Ireland
• Susan Epstein, City University of NY, USA
• Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Spain
• Youssef Hamadi, MSR Cambridge, UK
• Frank Hutter (co-chair), University of British Columbia, Canada
• Henry Kautz, University of Washington, USA
• Sven Koenig, University of Southern California, USA
• Kevin Leyton-Brown, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Wheeler Ruml (co-chair), Palo Alto Research Center, USA
• Meinolf Sellmann, Brown University, USA
• Toby Walsh, University of New South Wales, Australia
• Shlomo Zilberstein, UMass Amherst, USA

Collocated events

We would like to inform potential attendees that AAAI-06 will also have a separate related workshop on "heuristic search, memory based heuristics and their applications". That workshop will be held on the following day (July 17) to enable interested people to attend both workshops if they so wish. See the following link for more details.

Workshop on Heuristic Search, Memory Based Heuristics and Their Applications, organised by Ariel Felner, Hector Geffner, and Robert Holte.

Previous meetings on related topics

• Planning and Learning in A Priori Unknown or Dynamic Domains, Vadim Bulitko and Sven Koenig, IJCAI Workshop '05
• Reasoning and Learning in Cognitive Systems, Pat Langley and Seth Rogers, symposium at Stanford '04
• Planning and Learning, Daniel Borrajo and Manuela Veloso, ICAPS Tutorial '04
• Probabilistic Approaches in Search, Carla Gomes and Toby Walsh, AAAI Workshop '02
• Stochastic Search Algorithms, Holger Hoos and Thomas Stuetzle, IJCAI Workshop '01 and IJCAI Workshop '03
• Empirical Methods in AI, Holger Hoos and Thomas Stuetzle, IJCAI Workshop '01
• Using Uncertainty within Computation, Carla Gomes and Toby Walsh, AAAI Fall Symposium '01
• Statistical Machine Learning for Large-Scale Optimization", Boyan, Buntine, and Jagota, IJCAI Workshop '99

Related links

Wiki for research on automated parameter tuning (hosted by Tom Carchrae)