Using Metareasoning in Heuristic Search - Concurrent Planning and Execution and Task and Motion Planning

Speaker: Erez Karpas

Abstract: 

Metareasoning is the process of thinking what to think about. In this talk, I will present two applications of metareasoning to heuristic search.

The first addresses concurrent planning and execution, in which time starts ticking as soon as the agent starts planning, and the agent may have to execute an action even before it has a complete plan. The second addresses task and motion planning, where the agent must decide where to invest its computation time, in order to find a solution as quickly as possible.

Short bio:

Erez Karpas is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where he is also head of the Cognitive Robotics Lab. He is currently a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin.

His main research interests are artificial intelligence and robotics, and specifically automated planning for robots.

He was a postdoctoral associate at the Model-based Embedded and Robotics Systems Group at MIT, under the supervision of Prof. Brian Williams. Before that, he was a research fellow and the research coordinator of the Technion-Microsoft Electronic-Commerce Research Center, under Prof. Moshe Tennenholtz. He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 under the supervision of Prof. Carmel Domshlak and Prof. Shaul Markovitch at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He obtained his M.Sc. (2005) and B.Sc. (2001) at the Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University.