Maria Fox

Research

My research is in AI Planning and Intelligent Autonomy. This includes planning domain modelling, domain modelling languages and their formal semantics, automatic domain analysis, planning for temporal and metric domains, continuous planning, plan validation and plan execution monitoring.

I have made a number of contributions to AI planning, in particular through the temporal and metric extensions of the Planning Domain Description Language (PDDL2.1 and PDDL+) which I co-developed with Derek Long. PDDL2.1 is the international standard modelling language for temporal and numeric planning. My current work is focussed on algorithms for temporal and numeric planning and planning with continuous functions of numeric variables (see my IJCAI-09 talk on Colin)

In recent work on learning high level descriptions of the behaviours of executive systems I have started to address the problem of learning concepts of action and change from sensed data. I am now starting to combine temporal and metric planning with continuous and model-based reasoning, and am interested in automating the acquisition of the models. I envisage exciting application of this technology in a range of autonomous system applications. For example:

• recent work with Stephen McArthur on condition monitoring of electrical power systems in the electricity supply industry
• collaboration with Kanna Rajan on deliberative autonomy in AUVs, in particular we are working on integrating adaptive sampling with planning
• collaboration with Brian Williams on learning stochastic models of behaviour and integrating these with model-based planning

I have just started a new collaboration with Ari Jonsson through the Icelandic Institute for Intelligent Machines at Reykjavik University.

In March 2009 I ran a seminar on Dynamics of Complex Networks as part two of a three-part seminar programme entitled Complex Networks across the Natural and Technological Sciences held in the Institute for Advanced Studies.

Position

Funded Projects

I have been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on 9 EPSRC-funded research projects since 1999.

External Research Activities

I have undertaken the following roles in the international AI community.

• Program co-chair (with David Poole) of AAAI 2010, to be held in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Associate Editor: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2003-2006.
• Advisory board member: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 2006-continuing.
• Associate Editor: AI Communications 2004-2009
• Associate Editor-in-Chief: AI Communications 2009-continuing.
• Editorial Board member: Artificial Intelligence 2006-2008.
• Associate Editor: Artificial Intelligence 2008-continuing.
• Guest Editor (with David E. Smith, NASA-AMES): Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research: special track on 4th International Planning Competition, AAAI-Press 2005-2006.
• Guest Editor (with Sylvie Thiebaux, Australian National University): Artificial Intelligence: special issue on Advances in Automated Planning, Elsevier 2009.
• Guest Editor (with Rong Qu, University of Nottingham, and Derek Long, University of Strathclyde): Journal of Scheduling: special issue on Planning and Scheduling, Wiley 2008.
• Co-Chair (with Mark Boddy and Sylvie Thiebaux) : International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2007.
• Invited speaker: ICAPS 2009
• Program Committee member:
  • Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This is a premier international conference in AI. I have been a PC member in 2002, 2005 and 2006.
  • The International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). This is the premier international conference in planning and scheduling. It occurs annually and I have been a PC member every year since 2000. I will be the sponsorship chair in 2010.
  • International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). A premier international conference in AI, I was on the senior PC in 2001 and an Area Chair for Planning in 2009.
• Member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) college since 2001.
• NSF panel member, 2009
• Three times EPSRC Information and Communications Technology (ICT) panel member (Jan and April 2007 and September 2008).

Participation in International Events and Systems Development

• Organiser (with Derek Long) of the 3rd International Planning Competition in 2002. The competition was associated with the AI Planning and Scheduling conference (AIPS) in 2002, held in Toulouse, and the theme was Temporal and Numeric Planning.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long and Richard Howey) of VAL, the plan validation tool. This can be used to validate planning domain models and plans for PDDL+ as well as for all of the competition variants of the PDDL family. It has been used as supporting software in the International Planning Competitions since 2002 and has checked the validity of thousands of plans.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long) of the STAN planning system, which successfully participated in the first international planning systems competition at the AIPS-98 international conference.
• Participation, with an extensively modified STAN system in the second international planning competition (at AIPS-00) achieving one of the best planner awards - the only STRIPS-only planner to do so.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long) of the TIM pre-planning domain-analysis system. This work has been extended to include a publically available applications programmer interface, and it is now being adopted into many planning systems.
• Joint developer (with Keith Halsey, Derek Long, Andrew Coles and Amanda Coles) of the CRIKEY planning system for temporal coordination.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long, Andrew Coles and Amanda Coles) of the TSGP planning system: a rational reconstruction of Wah and Chen's SGPlan planner.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long, Andrew Coles and Amanda Coles) of the LPRPG planner for intelligent reasoning about metric resources.
• Joint developer (with Derek Long, Andrew Coles and Amanda Coles) of the Colin planner for linear continuous planning.

Awards and Prizes

• Recipient of a French Government-funded Senior Research Fellowship: competitively awarded CNRS poste rouge (Sept 2003-Jul 2004). This funded my research visit to LAAS where I collaborated with Malik Ghallab and Felix Ingrand.
• Recipient of an MIT Visiting Professorship (April-July 2002). This funded a research visit to MIT in 2002, where I worked with Professor Brian Williams.
• The paper "Learning Models of Plant Behavior for Anomaly Detection and Condition Monitoring", by A.J. Brown, V.M. Catterson, M. Fox, D. Long, and S.D.J. McArthur, was awarded a research paper prize at IEEE Conference on Intelligent Systems Applied to Power Systems, 2007.
• Recently completed (2006) EPSRC grant, GR/R89325/02, "A Modelling Language and Development Tools for Temporal Planning", was rated Outstanding in its final peer-review assessment. This project developed the VAL plan validation tool for automated validation of continuous planning models and plans.
• The paper "Exploiting a Graphplan Framework in Temporal Planning" published in the 13th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-03) was awarded the Best Basic Research Paper award.
• The paper, "Automatic Synthesis and use of Generic Types in Planning", published at the International Conference on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS-00), was awarded Outstanding Research Paper Award. An extended and developed presentation of this work was invited for presentation in the IJCAI-01 Distinguished Paper track (one of just 13 papers across all AI to be invited). Subsequently, a significantly extended paper based on this work was published in the Morgan-Kaufmann volume "Exploring AI in the New Millennium", edited by Gerhard Lakemeyer and Bernhard Nebel.
• The planning system, STAN, codeveloped with Derek Long, was awarded prizes for its performance in the International Planning Competitions of 1998 and 2000.

Employment History

• Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University College London, 1989-1995.
• Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, 1995-2000.
• Reader in Computer Science, University of Durham, 2000-2003.
• CNRS fellow, Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systemes, 2003-2004
• Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, 2003-continuing.