Student Support for the 2020 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports travel for select students participating in the Doctoral Mentoring Consortium (DMC) at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) that will be held in October 2020 in Nancy, France and the associated summer school held in conjunction with the conference. ICAPS is the premier international conference for researchers in artificial intelligence research across a fully international research community. Artificial intelligence promises broad positive societal impacts in areas ranging from sustainability, smart grids, health care, user-specific education, scientific discovery, and robotics, to name a few. Automated planning and scheduling research is central to improving decision making in dynamic environments. The DMC creates the opportunity to engage students who might not have attended an AI conference due to lack of resources. This will draw more talent into AI research, improve research ideas in their formative stage, and engender collaborations across the breadth of disciplines. This event provides students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research and enables them to explore their career objectives. This consortium is oriented on research and career development for students who have identified their PhD topics and are just embarking on that independent research. The central activities for the DMC include opportunities for students to present and discuss their work with their peers; interaction with an identified group of senior researchers for advice on Ph.D. research; a career panel to discuss career choices in industry and academia; small group activities led by assigned mentors; and opportunity for interactions with the international research community in AI, which might lead to future collaborative activity. In addition, the DMC affords access to tutorial, workshops, and demonstrations that will provide detailed overviews of specific subfields by leading researchers in the field. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.