Associate Professor Computer Sciences Laboratory The Australian National University Director Canberra Research Laboratory National ICT Australia E-mail: Telephone: (+61) 2 6267 6311 Fax: (+61) 2 6267 6220 Mailing Address: NICTA, Locked Bag 8001, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia Location: Tower A, 7 London Crt (main office) & RSISE Building (115) ANU, Canberra

I am a member of the ANU/NICTA Diagnosis, Planning, & Optimisation Group. My interests are in artificial intelligence, particularly planning, model-based diagnosis, search, and reasoning under uncertainty. My current research focuses on developing planning and diagnosis techniques that can handle larger and more complex problems featuring uncertainty, time, and coordination among multiple entities. I have investigated applications of these techniques in the fields of robotics, intelligent transport, power distribution, and operations planning.

Recent Projects

New ARC discovery project "Exploiting Structure in AI Planning".

NICTA project SuperCom: model-based Supervision of Composite systems. The project has developed a spectrum of powerful methods for monitoring and diagnosing distributed dynamic systems. These methods rely on decentralised reasoning, symbolic representations, and model compilation.

NICTA project DPOLP: Dynamic Planning, Optimisation and Learning Project. DPOLP has made a number of significant contributions to building tools for planning with time and uncertainty, and to bridging the gap between Petri nets analysis, planning/heuristic search in artificial intelligence, and statistical machine learning.

Biography

Professional Activities

I am or was involved in the following

• Special issue of the Artificial Intelligence journal: Advances in Automated Plan Generation Systems
• The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
• The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, ICAPS-10, ICAPS-09, ICAPS-08, ICAPS-07 (co-chair), ICAPS-06, ICAPS-05, ICAPS-04 (tutorials chair), ICAPS-03, AIPS-02, ECP-01, ECP-99 and ECP-97.
• The European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI-08 (area chair), ECAI-06.
• The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-09 (workshop chair), IJCAI-07.
• The American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI-10, AAAI-06, AAAI-02.
• The Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AI-03, AI-02 and and AI-98
• The German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-05, KI-04.
• The Workshop on Model-Checking in Artificial Intelligence, MoChArt-05, MoChArt-03, MoChArt-02
• The ICAPS-03 workshop on PDDL (co-chair)
• The AIPS-02 workshop on Planning as Model-Checking (co-chair)
• The Conference of Australian Institutes of Transport Research CAITR-00 (chair).
• The IJCAI-99 workshop Scheduling and Planning meet Real-time Monitoring in a Dynamic and Uncertain World
• ECAI-98 workshop Decision Theory Meets Artificial Intelligence

The slides of the presentation I gave in 2006 about CSL and NICTA to prospective honours students in DCS can be found there.

• Ayman Ghoneim is pursuing a PhD in mechanism design applications to planning.
• Priscilla Kan-John is pursuing a PhD on model-based diagnosis of dynamic systems.
• Elena Kelareva is pursuing a PhD on ship scheduling

In the past:

• Doug Aberdeen, PhD, ANU, 2003. Now researcher at Google.
• Charles Gretton, Honours, ANU, 2002. PhD, ANU, 2006. Now researcher at the University of Birmingham.
• Jean-Marc Guinnebault, PhD, University of Rennes, 1998. Now head of bioinformatics R& D at Genset.
• Sarah Hickmott, PhD, University of Adelaide, 2008. Now Researcher at RMIT University
• Iain Little, Honours, ANU, 2004.
• David Price, Honours, ANU, 2002. Now software engineer at Wizard Information Services
• Anika Schumann, Masters, University of Rostock, 2003, PhD, ANU, 2008. Now Researcher at 4C

• B. Bonet, P. Halsum, S. Hickmott, and S. Thiébaux. Directed Unfolding of Petri Nets. Transactions on Petri Nets and other Models of Concurrency (TopNoc), 2008. [pdf] © Springer


• I. Little and S. Thiébaux. Probabilistic Planning vs Replanning ICAPS Workshop International Planning Competition: Past, Present and Future, 2007. [pdf]


• B. Bonet, P. Halsum, S. Hickmott, and S. Thiébaux. Planning Via Petri Net Unfolding: Generalisation and Improvements Submitted for publication, 2007. [pdf]


• S. Hickmott, J. Rintanen, S. Thiébaux, and L. White. Planning via Petri Net Unfolding. 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07). [pdf] © IJCAI


• E. Kelareva, O. Buffet, J. Huang, and S. Thiébaux. Factored Planning Using Decomposition Trees. 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07). [pdf] © IJCAI


• J. Hoffmann, S. Edelkamp, S. Thiébaux, R. Englert, F. Liporace, and S. Trueg. Engineering Benchmarks for Planning: the Domains Used in the Deterministic Part of the IPC-4. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 26:453-541, August 2006. [pdf] © AI Acces Foundation


• I. Little and S. Thiébaux. Concurrent Probabilistic Planning in the Graphplan Framework. 16th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-06), AAAI Press, Cumbria (UK), June 2006. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• S. Thiébaux, C. Gretton, J. Slaney, D. Price, and F. Kabanza. Decision-Theoretic Planning with non-Markovian Rewards. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 25:17-74, January 2006. [pdf] © AI Acces Foundation


• S. Thiébaux, J. Hoffmann and B. Nebel. In Defense of PDDL Axioms. Artificial Intelligence 168(1-2):38-69, Elsevier, October 2005. [pdf] © Elsevier
  
  Short version: 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), Morgan Kaufmann, Acapulco (Mexico), August 2003. [ps.gz   pdf] © IJCAII


• I. Little, D. Aberdeen, and S. Thiébaux. Prottle: A Probabilistic Temporal Planner. 20th American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), AAAI Press, Pittsburgh (USA), July 2005. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• F. Kabanza and S. Thiébaux. Search Control in Planning for Temporally Extended Goals. 15th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-05), AAAI Press, Monterey (USA), June 2005. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• C. Gretton and S. Thiébaux. Exploiting First-Order Regression in Inductive Policy Selection. 20th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-04) Morgan Kaufmann, Banf (Canada), July 2004. [pdf] © the authors.


• D. Aberdeen, S. Thiébaux and L. Zhang. Decision-Theoretic Military Operations Planning. 14th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-04), AAAI Press, Whistler (Canada), June 2004. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• C. Gretton, D. Price and S. Thiébaux. Implementation and Comparison of Solution Methods for Decision Processes with Non-Markovian Rewards. 19th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-03), Morgan Kaufmann, Acapulco (Mexico), August 2003. [ps.gz   pdf] © the authors.


• B. Bonet and S. Thiébaux. GPT Meets PSR. 13th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-03), AAAI Press, Trento (Italy), June 2003. [ps.gz   pdf] © AAAI Press


• D. Long, D. McDermott and S. Thiébaux editors. Proceedings of the ICAPS-03 Workshop on PDDL. Trento (Italy), June 2003. [pdf]


• S. Thiébaux, F. Kabanza and J. Slaney. Anytime State-Based Solution Methods for Decision Processes with Non-Markovian Rewards. 18th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-02) pages 501-510, Morgan Kaufmann, Edmonton (Canada), July 2002. [ps.gz   pdf] © Morgan Kaufmann


• P. Bertoli, A. Cimatti, J. Slaney and S. Thiébaux. Solving Power Supply Restoration Problems with Planning via Symbolic Model-Checking. 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-02), pages 576-580, IOS Press, Lyon (France), July 2002. [pdf] © the authors


• F. Kabanza and S. Thiébaux editors. Proceedings of the AIPS-02 Workshop on Planning via Model-Checking. LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse (France), April 2002. [pdf]


• S. Thiébaux and M.-O. Cordier. Supply Restoration in Power Distribution Systems -- A Benchmark for Planning under Uncertainty. 6th European Conference on Planning (ECP-01), pages 85-95, Springer Verlag, Toledo (Spain), September 2001. [ps.gz   pdf] © Springer


• J. Slaney and S. Thiébaux. Blocks World Revisited. Artificial Intelligence 125(1-2):119-153, Elsevier, January 2001. [pdf] © Elsevier


• J. Slaney and S. Thiébaux. Linear-Time Near-Optimal Planning in the Blocks World. 13th American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-96), pages 1208-1214, AAAI Press/The MIT Press, Portland (OR), August 1996. [ps.gz] © AAAI Press
  More about the topic: see the Blocks World page


• S. Thiébaux, J. Hertzberg, W. Schoaff, and M. Schneider. A Stochastic Model of Actions and Plans for Anytime Planning under Uncertainty. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 10(2):155-183, John Wiley, February 1995. [ps.gz] © John Wiley
  
  Short version: 2nd European Workshop on Planning (EWSP-93), pages 292-305, Vasdena (Sweden), IOS Press, December 1993. [ps.gz] © IOS Press


• J. Hertzberg and S. Thiébaux. Turning an Action Formalism into a Planner. Journal of Logic and Computation, Special Issue on Actions and Processes, 4(5):617-654, Oxford University Press, October 1994. [ps.gz] © Oxford University Press
  
  Very short version: 8th International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS-94), pages 305-314, Charlotte (NC), LNAI 869, October 1994. [ps.gz] © Springer


• S. Thiébaux and J. Hertzberg. A Semi-Reactive Planner Based on a Possible Models Action Formalization. 1st International Conference on AI Planning Systems (AIPS-92), pages 228-235, Morgan Kaufmann, College Park (MD), June 1992. [ps.gz] © Morgan Kaufmann

Search

• P. Kilby, J. Slaney, S. Thiébaux and T. Walsh. Estimating Search Tree Size. 21th American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06), AAAI Press, Boston (USA), July 2006. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• P. Kilby, J. Slaney, S. Thiébaux and T. Walsh. Backbones and backdoors in satisfiability. 20th American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), AAAI Press, Pittsburgh (USA), July 2005. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• S. Thiébaux, J. Slaney and P. Kilby. Estimating the Hardness of Optimisation. 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2000), pages 123-127, IOS Press, Berlin (Germany), August 2000. [ps.gz] © the authors


• J. Slaney and S. Thiébaux. On the Hardness of Decision and Optimisation Problems. 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-98), pages 244-248, John Wiley, Brighton (UK), August 1998. [ps.gz] © John Wiley

Diagnosis

• A. Schumann, Y. Pencolé, and S. Thiébaux. A Spectrum of On-line Symbolic Diagnosis Approaches. 22nd American National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07), AAAI Press, Vancouver (Canada), July 2007. [ pdf] © AAAI Press


• A. Schumann, Y. Pencolé, and S. Thiébaux. Diagnosis of Discrete-Event Systems using Binary Decision Diagrams 15th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX-04), Carcassonne (France), June 2004. [pdf] © the authors.


• M.-O. Cordier, J.-P. Krivine, P. Laborie, and S. Thiébaux. Alarm Processing and Reconfiguration in Power Distribution Systems. 11th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems (IEA/AIE-98), pages 230-241, LNAI, Springer Verlag, Benicassim (Spain), June 1998.


• M.-O. Cordier, S. Thiébaux, O. Jehl and J.-P. Krivine. Supply Restoration in Power Distribution Systems: A Reference Problem in Diagnosis and Reconfiguration. 8th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX-97), pages 37-34, Le Mont Saint Michel (France), September 1997. [ps.gz] © the authors


• S. Thiébaux, M.-O. Cordier, O. Jehl, and J.-P. Krivine. Supply restoration in Power Distribution Systems -- A Case Study in Integrating Model-Based Diagnosis and Repair Planning. 12th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-96), pages 525-532, Morgan Kaufmann, Portland (OR), August 1996. [pdf] © Morgan Kaufmann


• M.-O. Cordier and S. Thiébaux. Event-Based Diagnosis for Evolutive Systems. 5th International Workshop on Principles of Diagnosis (DX-94), pages 64-69, New Palz (NY), October 1994. [ps.gz] © the authors
  
  Alternative version somewhat extended, with a different example: [ps.gz] © the authors

Robotics

• S. Thiébaux and P. Lamb. Combining Kalman filtering and Markov localization in network-like environments. 6th Pacific-Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI-2000), pages 756-766, LNAI, Springer Verlag, Melbourne (Australia), August 2000. [ps.gz] © Springer


• S. Thiébaux and P. Lamb. Vehicle Location as State Estimation in a Switching Environment. 9th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR-99), JARA, Tokyo (Japan), October 1999.

Intelligent Transport Systems

• S. Dunstall, M. Horn, P. Kilby, M. Krishnamoorthy, B. Owens, D. Sier and S. Thiébaux. An automated Itineray Planning System for Holiday Travel. Information Technology and Tourism, 6:3(195-210), 2004.


• P. Lamb and S. Thiébaux. Avoiding Explicit Map-Matching in Vehicle Location. 6th ITS World Congress (ITS-99), Toronto (Canada), November 1999. [msword]


• S. Thiébaux, P. Lamb, and B. Robinson. Updating Turn Probabilities at Intersections in Response to Traffic Incidents. 4th International Conference of ITS Australia (ITSA-99), Adelaide (Australia), May 1999.
  [ps.gz   pdf]
  
  Extended (but older) version:Technical Report CMIS 98/140, CSIRO Math. & Info. Sc., Canberra (Australia), July 1998. [ps.gz] © CSIRO