Álvaro Torralba

About me

Publications

Research Activities

Software

ConAn

Past Projects

Teaching

Invited talks and Master Classes:

Master Class at SoCS 23

In 2023 edition of The 16th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) at Prague, I was invited to open the conference with a Master Class on: "Decoupled Search: A New Form of State-Space Exploration"






Check the slides here!




Invited talk at HSDIP 23

In 2023 edition of the "Workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning" (HSDIP) at Prague, I gave the Invited Talk on "Contrastive Analysis: Heuristic Search Beyond Heuristics"






Check the slides here!

Event Organization:

HSDIP Workshop 2021

The 13th edition of this traditional "Workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning" at ICAPS 2021, online edition

HSDIP is focused on understanding the underlying principles of current heuristics and search methods, their limitations, ways for overcoming those limitations, as well as the synergy between heuristics and search, in the context of Domain-Independent Planning.

All the talks were recorded and can also be found online on the HSDIP Youtube channel.



Events at ICAPS 2020

Doctoral Consortium 2020 Doctoral Consortium 2020 On October 26th it took place a new edition of the Doctoral Consortium at ICAPS 2020, (online edition) The Doctoral Consortium (DC) is intended to provide Ph.D. students with the opportunity to interact closely with established researchers and to get feedback on their research, get advice on career possibilities and build a professional network, improving the cohesion of new researchers with the ICAPS community. I was the organizer of the 2020 edition with Chiara Piacentini If you missed it, you have already the opportunity to have a look at the interesting invited talks by Amanda Coles and Subbarao Kambhampati. The invited talk "Polanyi vs. Planning (Planning around AI's New Romance with Tacit Knowledge)" by Subbarao Kambhampati was recorded and it is available on the DC webpage, as well as the slides from the invited talk given by Amanda Coles about "The Peer Review Process in AI: How it works and How to Write a Good Review"

HSDIP 2020 Workshop on Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning (HSDIP) 2020 On October 21st it took place the 12th edition of this traditional workshop at ICAPS 2020, online edition HSDIP is focused on understanding the underlying principles of current heuristics and search methods, their limitations, ways for overcoming those limitations, as well as the synergy between heuristics and search, in the context of Domain-Independent Planning. I was the organizer of the 2020 edition with Alberto Camacho, Salomé Eriksson, Daniel Fišer, Guillem Francès, Florian Geißer, Patrik Haslum, Jendrik Seipp, Silvan Sievers, and David Speck, If you missed it, you can find the proceedings, talks and the related information at the HSDIP webpage. All the talks were recorded and can also be found online on the HSDIP Youtube channel.





International Planning Competition 2018 (IPC'18)

The International Planning Competition is organized in the context of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. It consists of an empirically evaluation of the state-of-the-art planners in a blind set of benchmarks established by the Organization. From the first edition in 1998, there have been 9 editions of the IPC, and it has become an important reference in the Planning Community. The objetives of the competition are:



• Promote the Research on Planning
• Provide a set of benchmarks to evaluate the different algorithms
• Highlight the challenges that Planning is facing
• Evaluate the progression of planning techniques along the years



Last edition of the IPC was in 2018. I was the organizer of the Classical Tracks with Florian Pommerening




Awards ceremony at ICAPS'18 in Delft.



The rules, results, domains and all the info related to the IPC can be found at the IPC 2018 website.

The Awards Ceremony can be seen in this video





We have also organized other activities related with the IPC with more analysis and detailed information about it:

Tutorial: An Overview of the International Planning Competition We organized a Tutorial about the International Planning Competition at the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Honolulu in 2019. If you are wondering to know more about the IPC at a high level, take a look at the material related to the tutorial. An Overview of the International Planning Competition This tutorial was organized and presented with Florian Pommerening (co-organizer of the Classical Track with me) and Amanda Coles, and Andrew Coles (organizers of the Temporal Track)

Workshop on the International Planning Competition (WIPC) On ICAPS 2019 in Berkeley we organized a Workshop on the International Planning Competition, with the objective of analysing the result of the IPC'18, discussing the future challenges and providing a venue for discussing aspects that will be helpful for preparing forthcoming competitions. This Workshop was organized with Florian Pommerening, Thomas Keller, Amanda Coles, and Andrew Coles The information on the Workshop and the proccedings of the works published there can be found here



Tutorials: Alternatives to Explicit State Space Search (2017):

At the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2017, Daniel Gnad and I organized two related tutorials about alternatives to the explicit search. Concretly, we spoke about Symbolic Search and Decoupled Search.

If you are curious about it, you can take a look at the slides that we prepared for this event and/or the recorded tutorial:





Alternatives to Explicit State Space Search: Symbolic Search Video

Alternatives to Explicit State Space Search: Decoupled Search Video

Workshop on Heuristic Search for Domain-Independent Planning (HSDIP)

Along the years, I (with others) have organized some workshops in the context of the International Conference of Planning and Scheduling. This is one of the Workshops with a longer tradition within ICAPS conference (it started on 2007), and it has become an important piece for the ICAPS community.

It is focus on understanding the underlying principles of current heuristics and search methods, their limitations, ways for overcoming those limitations, as well as the synergy between heuristics and search, in the context of Domain-Independent Planning. In this forum we aim to discuss about the progress of the research, not only by presenting works, but also by open pannels and discussions.

You can find below more information about the editions in which I was part of the organization team:

• HSDIP 2021 at ICAPS 2021 (online edition)
• HSDIP 2020 at ICAPS 2020 (online edition)
• HSDIP 2017 at ICAPS 2017 in Pittsburgh
• HSDIP 2016 at ICAPS 2016 in London

Other talks

I researched in deep about Symbolic Search, specially in the context of Optimal Planning.

Related to this thema, I gave a general, high-level talk about it, (Large-Scale Symbolic Search) at the International Workshop of Pattern Databases and Large-Scale Search in 2018 at the Freie Universität from Berlin.

The slides can be found here

Other activities

I use to partticipate and be a member of the (Senior) Program Commitees of the most important conferences on the area of Artificial Intelligence and Domain Independence Planning:

I also review for the following Journals:

• Reviewer of Artificial Intelligence Journal
• Reviewer of Journal of Artificial Intelligence
• Reviewer of AI Communications