Malik Ghallab is a Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research, France. For most of his career he has been with LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse. His research activity is mainly focused on planning, acting and learning in robotics and AI. He has contributed to topics such as object recognition and pattern matching, scene interpretation, heuristics search, unification algorithms, knowledge compiling, temporal reasoning, planning, monitoring, and learning of robots skills and models of behaviors. He has co-authored several books and over two hundred scientific publications. He has been head of a French research program in Robotics, director of LAAS-CNRS and CEO for Science and Technology of INRIA. He has been Program Chair of several major international conferences including the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), and has chaired the ICAPS Steering Committee. He also has been on the editorial boards of several major AI journals. He is an ECCAI Fellow.
Dana Nau is a Professor at the University of Maryland, in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Systems Research. He does research in automated planning and game theory, and has more than 300 refereed technical publications. Some of his best-known research contributions include the discovery of pathological game trees (in which looking farther ahead produces worse decision-making), the strategic planning algorithm that Bridge Baron used to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge, applications of AI in automated manufacturing, automated planning systems such as SHOP, SHOP2, and Pyhop, evolutionary game-theoretic studies of cultural evolution, and (with Malik Ghallab and Paolo Traverso) the graduate-level textbook, Automated Planning: Theory and Practice. He has chaired ICAPS and several other major conferences, and has been on the editorial boards of JAIR, ACM TIST, and several other major journals. He is an AAAI Fellow and an ACM Fellow.
Paolo Traverso is the Director of FBK ICT-IRST, the Center for Information and Communication Technology at FBK. The Center counts about 200 people working on artificial intelligence, automated planning, cognitive computing, complex data analytics, and adaptive and reliable systems. The Center is part of the European Institution of Innovation and Technology (EIT) in ICT, the EIT Digital, whose goal is to foster innovation and impact on market and society. Paolo joined FBK IRST after working in the advanced technology groups of companies for management information consulting in Chicago, London, and Milan, where he led projects for the development of safety critical systems, data and knowledge management, and service oriented applications. He has contributed to research in artificial intelligence, automated planning and service oriented computing with more than one hundred papers in main international journals and conferences. He has been Program Chair of several major international conferences including the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), and has been a member of the ICAPS Steering Committee. He has been on the editorial boards of several major AI journals. He is an ECCAI Fellow.