The Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science

Jochen Renz - Selected Publications

Books:

B. Pfahringer, J. Renz (eds), AI 2015: Advances in Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 9457, Springer, 2015.

J. Renz, Representation and Reasoning about Expressive Spatial Information, Habilitation, Computer Science Department, Vienna University of Technology, 2003.
J. Renz, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning with Topological Information, LNCS 2293, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2002. ( Buy it! )

Book Chapters:

J. Renz and X. Ge, Physics Simulation Games, in: R. Nakatsu, M. Rauterberg, P. Ciancarini, eds., Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies, Springer, 2015. (pdf file)

A. G. Cohn and J. Renz, Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning, in: F. van Hermelen, V. Lifschitz, B. Porter, eds., Handbook of Knowledge Representation, Elsevier, 551-596, 2008. (pdf file)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning using Constraint Calculi, in: M. Aiello, I. Pratt-Hartmann, J. van Benthem, eds., Handbook of Spatial Logics, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 161-215, 2007. (pdf file)

J. Renz, R. Rauh, M. Knauff, Towards Cognitive Adequacy of Topological Spatial Relations, in: C. Freksa, W. Brauer, C. Habel, K.F. Wender, eds., Spatial Cognition II - Integrating abstract theories, empirical studies, formal models, and practical applications, LNCS 1849, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000, 184-197. (pdf file)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, Spatial Reasoning with Topological Information, in: C. Freksa, C. Habel, K.F. Wender, eds., Spatial Cognition - An interdisciplinary approach to representation and processing of spatial knowledge, LNCS 1404, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998, 351-372. (pdf file)

Journal Papers:

M Stephenson, J Renz, X. Ge, The Computational Complexity of Angry Birds, Artificial Intelligenge (AIJ), Volume 280, March 2020. (DOI)

J. Renz, X. Ge, M Stephenson and P. Zhang, AI meets Angry Birds, Nature Machine Intelligence (NatMachIntell), Volume 1, 329, July 2019. (pdf file)

M Stephenson, J Renz, X. Ge and P. Zhang, Generating Stable, Building Block Structures from Sketches, IEEE Transactions on Games (TG), 2019, to appear. (pdf file)

M Stephenson, J Renz, X. Ge, LN Ferreira, J Togelius, P. Zhang, The 2017 AIBIRDS Level Generation Competition, IEEE Transactions on Games (TG), Volume 11, Issue 3, 2019. (pdf file)

X. Ge, J. Renz, and P. Zhang, Visual Detection of Unknown Objects in Video Games using Qualitative Stability Analysis, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG), 8(2):166-177, 2016. (pdf file)

J. Renz, R. Miikkulainen, N. R. Sturtevant, M. H. M. Winands, Guest Editorial: Physics-Based Simulation Games, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG), 8(2):101-103, 2016. (pdf file)

M. Westphal, S. Woelfl, B. Nebel, and J. Renz, On Qualitative Route Descriptions, Journal of Philosophical Logic (J. Phil. Logic), 44(2):177-201, 2015. (pdf file)

J. Renz, X. Ge, S. Gould, and P. Zhang, The Angry Birds AI Competition, AI Magazine, 36(2):85-87, 2015. (pdf file)

R. Costanza et al., Simulation games that integrate research, entertainment, and learning around ecosystem services, Ecosystem Services (ES), 10:195-201, 2014. (pdf file)

A. G. Cohn, S. Li, W. Liu, and J. Renz, Reasoning about Topological and Cardinal Direction Relations Between 2-Dimensional Spatial Objects, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 51:493-532, 2014. (pdf file)

J. Huang, J. J. Li, and J. Renz, Decomposition and Tractability in Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), 195:140-165, 2013. (pdf file)

M. Broxvall, P. Jonsson, and J. Renz, Disjunctions, Independence, Refinements, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), 140(1-2):153-173, 2002. (pdf file)

A. Gerevini, J. Renz, Combining Topological and Size Constraints for Spatial Reasoning, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), 137(1-2):1-42, 2002. (pdf file)

J. Renz, A Canonical Model of the Region Connection Calculus, Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics (JANCL), 12(3-4):469-494, 2002. (pdf file)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, Efficient Methods for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 15, 289-318, 2001. (pdf file) (software)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), 108(1-2): 69-123, 1999. (pdf file)

Conference Papers:

H. Hua, P. Zhang, J. Renz, Qualitative Place Maps for Landmark-based Localization and Navigation in GPS-denied Environments, 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL'19), November 2019, Chicago, IL, USA, to appear. (pdf file)

T. Liu, J. Renz, P. Zhang and M Stephenson, Using Restart Heuristics to Improve Agent Performance in Angry Birds, 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG'19), August 2019, London, UK. (pdf file)

H. Hua, J. Renz, X. Ge, Qualitative Representation and Reasoning over Direction Relations across Different Frames of Reference, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'18), Tempe, AZ, November 2018, 551-560. (pdf file)

X. Ge, J. Renz, H. Hua, Towards Explainable Inference about Object Motion using Qualitative Reasoning, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'18), Tempe, AZ, November 2018, 641-642. (Extended version available on arxiv)

M Stephenson, J. Renz, Deceptive Angry Birds: Towards Smarter Game-Playing Agents, International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2018 (FDG'18), Malmö, Sweden, August 2018. (pdf file)

D. Anderson, M Stephenson, J Togelius, C. Salge, J. Levine, J. Renz, Deceptive Games, International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation (Evostar'18), Parma, Italy, April 2018, 376-391. (pdf file)

M. Stephenson, J. Renz, Creating a Hyper-Agent for Solving Angry Birds Levels, The Thirteenth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE'17), Snowbird, UT, October 2017, 234-240. (pdf file)

M. Stephenson, J. Renz, X. Ge, The Computational Complexity of Angry Birds and Similar Physics-Simulation Games, The Thirteenth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE'17), Snowbird, UT, October 2017, 241-247. (pdf file)

M. Stephenson, J. Renz, Generating Varied, Stable and Solvable Levels for Angry Birds Style Physics Games, IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference 2017 (IEEE-CIG'17), New York, NY, August 2017, 288-295. (pdf file)

D. Perez-Liebana, M. Stephenson, R. Gaina, J. Renz, S. M. Lucas, Introducing Real World Physics and Macro-Actions to General Video Game AI, IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference 2017 (IEEE-CIG'17), New York, NY, August 2017, 248-255. (pdf file)

M. Stephenson, J. Renz, Procedural Generation of Levels for Angry Birds Style Physics Games, The Twelfth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE'16), Burlingame, CA, October 2016, 225-231.(pdf file)

M. Stephenson, J. Renz, Procedural Generation of Complex Stable Structures for Angry Birds Levels, IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference 2016 (IEEE-CIG'16), Santorini, Greece, September 2016, 1-8. (pdf file)

X. Ge, J. H. Lee, J. Renz, P. Zhang, Hole in One: Using Qualitative Reasoning for Solving Hard Physical Puzzle Problems, Proceedings of the 22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'16), The Hague, Netherlands, August 2016, 1762-1763. (Note: an extended version of this paper was accepted at QR'16, the 29th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning).

X. Ge, J. H. Lee, J. Renz, P. Zhang, Trend-Based Prediction of Spatial Change, Proceedings of the 25th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'16), New York, NY, July 2016, 1074-1080. (pdf file)

J. Renz, X. Ge, R. Verma, and P. Zhang, Angry Birds as a Challenge for Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference (AAAI'16), Phoenix, AZ, February 2016, 4338-4339. (pdf file)

P. Zhang, J. H. Lee, J. Renz, From Raw Sensor Data to Detailed Spatial Knowledge, Proceedings of the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'15), Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 2015, 610-616. (pdf file)

J. Renz, AIBIRDS: The Angry Birds Artificial Intelligence Competition, Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference (AAAI'15), Austin, TX, January 2015, 4326-4327. (pdf file)

X. Ge, J. Renz, Tracking Perceptually Indistinguishable Objects using Spatial Reasoning, Proceedings of the 13th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI'14), Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, December 2014, 600-613. (pdf file)

H. Sadeghi Sokeh, S. Gould, J. Renz, Determining Interacting Objects in Human-Centric Activities via Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning, Proceedings of the 12th Asian Conference on Computer Vision, Part V (ACCV 2014), Singapore, November 2014, 550-563. (pdf file)

P. Zhang, J. Renz, Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning in Angry Birds: the Extended Rectangle Algebra, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'14), Vienna, Austria, July 2014. (pdf file)

X. Ge, J. Renz, Representation and Reasoning about General Solid Rectangles, Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'13), Beijing, China, August 2013, 905-911. (pdf file)

J.H. Lee, J. Renz, D. Wolter, StarVars -- Effective Reasoning about Relative Direction Information, Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'13), Beijing, China, August 2013, 976-982. (pdf file)

H. Sadeghi Sokeh, S. Gould, J. Renz, Efficient Extraction and Representation of Spatial Information from Video Data, Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'13), Beijing, China, August 2013, 1076-1082. (pdf file)

J. Renz, Implicit Constraints for Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'12), Rome, Italy, June 2012, 509-518. (pdf file)

A. G. Cohn, J. Renz, M. Sridhar, Thinking inside the box: A comprehensive spatial representation for video analysis, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'12), Rome, Italy, June 2012, 588-592. (pdf file)

M. Westphal, J. Renz, Evaluating and Minimizing Ambiguities in Qualitative Route Instructions, Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS'11), Chicago, IL, November 2011, 171-180. (pdf file)

M. Westphal, S. Wölfl, B. Nebel, J. Renz, On Qualitative Route Descriptions: Representation and Computational Complexity, Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'11), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011, 1120-1125. (pdf file)

J.J. Li, J. Renz, In Defense of Large Qualitative Calculi, Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'10), Atlanta, GA, July 2010, 315-320. (pdf file)

J. Renz, S. Wölfl, A Qualitative Representation of Route Networks, Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'10), Lisbon, Portugal, August 2010, 1091-1092. (pdf file)
M. Duckham, M-H Jeong, S. Li, J. Renz, Decentralized querying of topological relations between regions without using localization, Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS'10), San Jose, CA, November 2010, 414-417 (pdf file)

B. Nebel, J. Renz, A Fixed-parameter Tractable Algorithm for Spatio-temporal Calendar Management, Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09), Pasadena, CA, July 2009, 878-889. (pdf file)

W. Liu, S. Li, J. Renz, Combining RCC-8 with Qualitative Direction Calculi: Algorithms and Complexity, Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09), Pasadena, CA, July 2009, 854-859. (pdf file)

J. J. Li, J. Huang, J. Renz, A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Solving Interval Algebra Networks, Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'09), Pasadena, CA, July 2009, 572-577. (pdf file), (software,benchmark instances (127MB))

J. Renz, J. J. Li, Automated Complexity Proofs for Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Calculi, Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'08), Sydney, Australia, September 2008, 715-723. (pdf file)

J. J. Li, T. Kowalski, J. Renz, and S. Li, Combining Binary Constraint Networks in Qualitative Reasoning, Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'08), Patras, Greece, July 2008, 515-519. (pdf file)

N. Foo, J. Renz, Experience and Trust: A Systems-Theoretic Approach, Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'08), Patras, Greece, July 2008, 917-918. (pdf file)

R. Martin-Hughes, J. Renz, Examining the Motivations of Defection in Large-Scale Open Systems, 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC-08), Fortaleza, Brazil, March 2008, 2039-2043.

J. Renz, F. Schmid, Customizing Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Calculi, in: Proceedings of the 20th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI-07), Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, December 2007, 293-304. (pdf file)

J. Renz, Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning: Efficient Algorithms for Everyone, in: Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-07), Hyderabad, India, January 2007, 526-531. (pdf file)

J. Renz, G. Ligozat,Weak Composition for Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, in: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP'05), Sitges, Spain, October 2005, 534-548. (pdf file)

J. Renz, D. Mitra, Qualitative Direction Calculi with Arbitrary Granularity, 8th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI'04), Auckland, New Zealand, August 2004, 65-74. (pdf file)

G. Ligozat, J. Renz, What is a Qualitative Calculus? A General Framework, 8th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI'04), Auckland, New Zealand, August 2004, 53-64. (pdf file)

G. Ligozat, J. Renz, Problems with Local Consistency for Qualitative Calculi, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'04), Valencia, Spain, August 2004, 1047-1048.

J. Renz, A Spatial Odyssey of the Interval Algebra: 1.Directed Intervals, in: Proceedings of the 17th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'01), Seattle, WA, August 2001, 51-56. (pdf file)

M. Broxvall, P. Jonsson, and J. Renz, Refinements and Independence: A Simple Method for Identifying Tractable Disjunctive Constraints, in: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP'00), Singapore, September 2000, 114-127. (pdf file)

R. Moratz, J. Renz, and D. Wolter, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning about Line Segments, in: Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'00), Berlin, Germany, August 2000, 234-238. (pdf file)

J. Renz, Maximal Tractable Fragments of the Region Connection Calculus: A Complete Analysis, in: Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'99), Stockholm, Sweden, August 1999, 448-455. (pdf file)
A. Gerevini, J. Renz, Combining Topological and Qualitative Size Constraints for Spatial Reasoning, in: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP'98), Pisa, Italy, October 1998, 220-234. (pdf file (slightly revised), �Springer-Verlag)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, Efficient Methods for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, in: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'98), Brighton, UK, August 1998, 562-566. (pdf file)(gzip'ed tar-archive of C-programs used for the evaluation 25k) (gzip'ed tar-archive of hard instances 300k)

J. Renz, A Canonical Model of the Region Connection Calculus, in: Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference (KR'98), Trento, Italy, June 1998, 330-341. (pdf file)

M. Knauff, R. Rauh, and J. Renz, A Cognitive Assessment of Topological Spatial Relations: Results from an Empirical Investigation, in: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT'97), Laurel Highlands, PA, October 1997, 193-206. (pdf file)

J. Renz, B. Nebel, On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus, in: Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'97), Nagoya, Japan, August 1997, 522-527. (pdf file)

Recent Technical Reports:

N. Foo, J. Renz, Experience and Trust: A Systems-Theoretic Approach, Technical Report No. UNSW-CSE-TR-0717, UNSW Computer Science and Engineering, Univerity of New South Wales, Sydney, August 2007. (pdf file)

Links:

Jochen Renz