Joerg Hoffmann
- I HAVE MOVED!
Saarland University
Campus E1 1, room 318
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
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hoffmann@cs.uni-saarland.de
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+49 (0) 681 302 71471
+49 (0) 681 302 57554
NEWS:
- Our paper won the best paper award at ICAPS'12:
- I gave an invited talk at KI'11, the 2011 German conference on
Artificial Intelligence. I was also invited to write a
paper: ... it's easy reading and fun, so if you don't
know what planning is but would like to, have a look! You can also
have a look at
the slides.
- Papers on a new tool
called TorchLight
have been published at JAIR'11 and ICAPS'11 (in this order
:-). TorchLight analyzes h+ search space topology without actually
running any search. See below under "Tools".
- As of lately, I'm a consultant
of Core Security
Technologies. They use planning software for "penetration
testing", which involves the automatic generation of attack paths,
thus helping companies to find vulnerabilities in their network. In
their current product, the planning is done by a variant of Metric-FF.
Publications.
Research Interests. I'm interested in a range of topics
involving issues such as hard search problems, practical problem
distributions, data structures and efficient implementation, modeling,
and validation. My main field of expertise is Automated Planning
(commonly also referred to as AI Planning), on which I have worked
since 1997. Since ca. 2003, I have also worked on topics from SAT/CP
and from Model Checking. Since 2006, I've been doing research on
Semantic Technologies, including automated composition of Web
services, modeling and discovery of geospatial Web services, and
semantic Business Process Management. Most recently I've taken up
research on Markov Decision Processes, and I've been doing a little
planning-based tourism in Cellular Automata and Natural Language
Sentence Generation.
Short CV. I received a diploma in computer science from
University Freiburg, Germany, in March 1999, and completed my PhD at
the same University in July 2002, with a thesis that won
the ECCAI
Dissertation award 2002. I stayed on as a Postdoc until August
2004. From September 2004 until April 2006, I was a Researcher at Max
Planck Institute for Computer Science, Saarbruecken, Germany. From
April 2006 through August 2006, I was a Visiting Scientist at Cornell
University, Ithaca, NY, USA. From September 2006 until April 2008, I
was a Senior Researcher at the University of Innsbruck (Austria),
where I submitted/obtained my Habilitation in March 2008/April
2009. From April 2008 until September 2009, I was a Senior Researcher
at SAP Research, Karlsruhe, Germany. From October 2009 until March
2012, I was a Directeur de Recherche at INRIA, Nancy, France, enjoying
French life style and partly also enjoying the French language :-) I
finally became a Professor at Saarland University in April 2012.
Tools. I have been involved in the development of several
planning and model checking tools, in
particular: IPP,
FF, SATPLAN, UPPAAL, Fast-Downward.
A recent tool I've developed
is TorchLight,
which allows to analyze search space topology without actually running
any search. The tool applies to planners based on the "ignoring delete
lists" relaxation. Papers on TorchLight have been accepted for
ICAPS'11: TorchLight-ICAPS
as well as
JAIR: TorchLight-JAIR. The
source code is publicly available under the GNU GPL
license: TorchLight.zip.
I have also developed a tool that is, technically speaking, rather
dull, but enjoys such popularity that I became bored of sending it
around per email. The tool, called adl2strips, translates PDDL
input with conditional effects etc to grounded STRIPS. This has been
used in the IPC 2004 competition, and in some later editions of the
IPC as well. Voila the source
code: adl2strips.zip.
Teaching.
Current:
Upcoming:
- Winter term 12/13, Saarland University: Automatic Planning
(Lecture).
Past:
- Winter term 07/08, University of Innsbruck: Automatic Planning
(Lecture).
- Winter term 05/06, Saarland University: Automatic Planning
(Lecture).
- Summer term 05, Saarland University: Automatic Planning Systems
(Seminar).
- Winter term 04/05, Saarland University: Search Methods for
Transition Systems, Example AI Planning (Lecture).
Awards.
- ICAPS
2012 best paper award (with Emil Keyder and Patrik Haslum).
- Co-winner
of the optimal track at the 7th International Planning Competition
(IPC'11), with Fast Downward Stone-Soup (1st prize) and
Merge-and-Shrink (2nd prize).
- Nominated for ICAPS 2011 best paper award.
- ICAPS
2008 influential paper award, honorable mention (with Jana
Koehler, Bernhard Nebel, and Yannis Dimopoulos).
- ICAPS
2007 best research paper award (with Malte Helmert and Patrik
Haslum).
- Nominated for IJCAI 2007 best paper award (with Carla Gomes,
Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman).
- Co-winner
of the optimal track at the 5th International Planning Competition
(IPC'06), with SATPLAN.
- Nominated for ICAPS 2006 best paper award (with Ashish Sabharwal
and Carmel Domshlak).
- IJCAII-JAIR best
paper prize 2005 (with Bernhard Nebel).
- AAAI 2005 Outstanding PC member award. Awarded for excellent
reviewing.
- ICAPS
2004 best paper award (with Ronen Brafman).
- Wolfgang-Gentner Nachwuchsfoerderpreis 2003.
- ECCAI
Dissertation award 2002. Award for the best European Dissertation
in the field of AI. Awarded annually by ECCAI, the European
Coordination Committee for Artificial Intelligence.
- Winner of the
fully-automated track at the 2nd International Planning Competition
(IPC'00), with FF.
- Winner
of the ADL track at the 1st International Planning Competition
(IPC'98), with IPP.
Selected Activities.
- Program Co-Chair of
the 26th
National Conference of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI'12).
- Member of the Executive Council of
the International
Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS).
- Associate Editor
of JAIR
(Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research).
- Area Chair for Planning
of AI Communications, the
European Journal on AI.
- Conference Co-Chair of
the 20th
International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling
(ICAPS'10).
- Invited Speaker at the 34th Annual
German Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
- Lecturer at
the ACAI
Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling 2011.
- Technical Coordinator of EU-funded STREP SWING: Semantic Web
Service Interoperability for Geospatial Decision Making.
- Demonstrations Chair of ESWC 2008.
- Doctoral Consortium Co-Chair of ICAPS 2007.
- Tutorial Chair of KI 2007.
- Founding member of the permanent IPC committee established by the
ICAPS council at ICAPS 2006.
- Member of the organizing committee of the International Planning
Competition 2006.
- Invited speaker at the Workshop on Local Search Techniques in
Constraint Satisfaction at CP 2005.
- Co-Chair of the International
Planning Competition 2004.
- Lecturer at the International Summer
School on AI Planning 2003.
- Member of the Senior Program Committees of AAAI'11, ICAPS'11,
IJCAI'11, AAAI'10, ICAPS'09, IJCAI'09, AAAI'08, and AAAI'07.
- Member of the Program Committees of KR'12, SOCS'11, KI'11,
CPAIOR'09, AIMSA'08, ECAI'08, ICAPS'08, ICAPS'07, KI'07, SPIN'07,
ECAI'06, AAAI'06, ICAPS'06, IJCAI'05, AAAI'05, ICAPS'05, ICAPS'04,
AI&Math'04, ICAPS'03, and AAAI'02.
- Co-Chair of the 3rd Workshop on Heuristics for
Domain-Independent Planning (HDIP'11) at ICAPS 2011.
- Co-Chair of the 2nd Workshop on Heuristics for
Domain-Independent Planning (HDIP'09) at ICAPS 2009.
- Co-Chair of the workshop Semantic Web meets Geospatial
Applications at AGILE 2008.
- Co-Chair of the workshop Heuristics for Domain-Independent
Planning: Progress, Ideas, Limitations, Challenges at ICAPS
2007.
- Co-Chair of the workshop
on the competition at ICAPS 2003.
Co-authors.
Ah yes, I also have hobbies.
Here's the glorious web page of my
band The
Inglorious Mustard Boys ...
visited 33 states (14.6%)
Create your own visited map of The World