Best Student Paper Prize for Informatics PhD student

Informatics PhD student Chiara Piacentini has been awarded the Best Student Paper prize in the Novel Applications track of the 2013 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS).  ICAPS is the premier conference on AI Planning and Scheduling, and this year was held in Rome.

Chiara's paper, "Combining a Temporal Planner with an External Solver for the Power Balancing Problem in an Electricity Network" is part of the £3.4m EPSRC-funded 'Autonomic Power System' project , looking at planning the operations of the power systems of the future: meeting the varying energy demands of consumers, whilst maximising the use of renewable sources.  The paper was co-authored with Varvara Alimisis of the Durham Energy Institute; and Professors Maria Fox and Derek Long from King's.  Chiara's talk was recorded, and is available to watch online:

More widely, the Planning Research Group from the Department of Informatics had a number of successes at ICAPS this year, with a total of six conference papers accepted, and delivered a well-received programme of tutorials on Temporal Planning.  The group continues to be actively involved with ICAPS, with Dr Amanda Coles and Dr Andrew Coles serving as workshop and tutorial chairs for ICAPS 2014, in Portsmouth, New England, and Dr Daniele Magazzeni serving as workshop chair for ICAPS 2015, Jerusalem.