Call for Participation in the Doctoral Consortium

The Eighteenth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS'08) invites Ph.D. students to apply for the Doctoral Consortium. The Doctoral Consortium will provide opportunities for Ph.D. students to discuss their work and to meet senior researchers with similar interests. Participants are eligible for consideration for financial support.

The Doctoral Consortium will feature a full day workshop on September 14th, where participants will present short talks on their work in small, themed clusters of common interest with students and senior researchers. Participants will have further opportunity to present at the poster session of the main conference. Two students will be distinguished with a best paper award and a best paper runner-up award, respectively. Each participant will be matched a mentor, a senior researcher in the relevant area who will meet with the student during the conference.

The Doctoral Consortium will additionally feature panels and tutorials, shared with the Doctoral Programme of the co-located CP'08 conference. Students from the two communities will have opportunity to meet informally at a joint doctoral dinner.

We encourage applications from Ph.D. students at any stage and from any topic area within Planning and Scheduling. Preference will be given to students who are far enough along to have formulated their thesis topic. Depending on the number of applications, it is expected that up to 30 students will be invited to participate.

Download the ASCII Call for Participation.

Application Requirements

Potential participants should submit an extended abstract of four (4) pages maximum. The submission should be in AAAI style and sent as a PDF file by email to Judy Goldsmith (goldsmit at cs.uky.edu). It should describe original work that is part of the doctoral work of the applicant. We encourage the submission of work that is still in progress. The authors should be formatted as:

    Student(s): ...
    Supervisor(s): ...

Student papers will be available during the conference and archived on the Doctoral Consortium website. If an extended version of the submission is also submitted to the main conference or a workshop, please indicate this with the submission.

Students who wish to participate in the Doctoral Consortium and have a full paper describing their work accepted to the technical programme of ICAPS'08 are not required to submit a short version of their paper as an extended abstract. They may simply send an email to Judy Goldsmith (goldsmit at cs.uky.edu) explaining that they wish to participate in the Doctoral Consortium. The title, author list, and abstract of the paper should be included. Such students will present their work at the Doctoral Consortium only if not scheduled for oral presentation at the main conference. The scholarship rules below will apply.

In addition, all applicants should submit their resume as a PDF file, together with a brief statement of at most two (2) pages describing their position in the doctoral process. The statement should be in 12 point font, single column, and include an approximate outline of the thesis proposal, or the next or current project; it can be submitted as either DOC or PDF file.

For all applicants, the student's thesis advisor should send a letter of recommendation by email to Judy Goldsmith (goldsmit at cs.uky.edu). The letter should:

confirm that the applicant is a Ph.D. student working in planning, scheduling, or related field;
describe the expected benefit for the student as a participant in the Doctoral Consortium;
indicate whether the student has already benefited and received financial support from a past ICAPS Doctoral Consortium;
indicate whether the student has a full paper accepted to ICAPS'08 describing her/his work; and
include the expected date for thesis submission.

This letter can be submitted as either text or PDF file.

Selection and Financial Support

Applicants will be invited to participate in the Doctoral Consortium based on the expected benefit to the student and to other students, taking into account the quality of the submission. Successful applicants are expected to actively participate in the whole programme. Those who have not participated in a previous Doctoral Consortium will be given higher priority for financial support.

Note that only students who apply and are invited for participation in the Doctoral Consortium can be considered for financial support.

Upcoming Deadlines

Submission deadline: June 18, 2008
Notification date: July 11, 2008
Final versions due: August 29, 2008
Doctoral Consortium: September 14, 2008

Invited Students

Shirin Sohrabi Araghi, Toronto, Canada
Debdeep Banerjee, ANU/NICTA, Australia
J. Benton, Arizona, USA
Sara Bernadini NASA/Trento, USA/Italy
Abdeslam Boularias, Laval, Canada
Emma Brunskill, MIT, USA
Larry Bush, MIT, USA
Karina Valdivia Delgado, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Emanuele di Rosa, Genova, Italy
Christian Fritz, Toronto, Canada
Saket Joshi, Tufts, USA
Michael Katz, Techinon, Israel
Lukas Kuhn, Munich/PARC, Germany/USA
Hui Li, MIT, USA
Robert Mattmüller, Freiburg, Germany
Leon Planken, Delft, Holland
Nathan Robinson, Griffith/NICTA, Australia
Gabi Röger, Freiburg, Germany
Julie Shah, MIT, USA
Cindy Ko-Hsin Wang, ANU/NICTA, Australisa
Brian Ziebart, CMU, USA

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

Judy Goldsmith, University of Kentucky, USA
Robert Sloan, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Neil Yorke-Smith, SRI International, USA

Programme Committee

Laura Barbulescu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Yixin Chen, Washington University in St Louis, USA
Carmel Domshlak, Technion, Israel
Stefan Edelkamp, University of Dortmund, Germany
Tara Estlin, NASA JPL, USA
Hector Geffner, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Malte Helmert, University of Freiburg, Germany
Joerg Hoffmann, University of Innsbruck (DERI), Austria
Henry Kautz, University of Rochester, USA
Graham Kendall, University of Nottingham, UK
Gilles Pesant, Universite de Montreal, Canada
Nicola Policella, ESA/ESOC, Germany and ISTC-CNR, Italy
Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire, USA
Miguel Angel Salido, University of Valencia, Spain
Toby Walsh, NICTA and UNSW, Australia
Fusun Yaman, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA