Symposium on Combinatorial Search - 2015

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant is to provide partial support for U.S.-based graduate and undergraduate students to attend the Eighth Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), a scientific conference to be held at the Dead Sea in Israel from June 11-15, 2015. The general field of the meeting is computer science. Combinatorial search is an area of computer science that deals with systematic trial-and-error exploration of a very large number of alternative solutions to a problem. For example, a package delivery truck needs to visit all the addresses to which packages must be delivered, and return to its home base, ideally via the shortest possible route. NSF funding is crucial to support students who would otherwise not be able to attend the symposium. Attending such meetings and presenting their research is an important part of the professional development of students, addressing a critical shortage of highly-skilled computer scientists in the U.S. SoCS brings together researchers in heuristic search and combinatorial optimization from all areas of artificial intelligence, planning, robotics, constraint programming, operations research, bioinformatics, and computer games. The intellectual merit of this activity stems from bringing together in one place at one time researchers from otherwise diverse areas of computer science that both advance the state of the art in heuristic search and/or combinatorial optimization, and also use these tools in their research. The broader impacts come from cross-fertilization of different fields that advance and/or use these tools, by promoting research in this area by providing a small intimate meeting on these topics, a forum for presenting such work, and archival proceedings for publishing work in this area. These latter goals are instrumental to training new researchers in this area.