Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (FAI) Group

Welcome to the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (FAI) Group at Saarland University!

We are located on the 3rd floor of building E 1 1 on the Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbruecken, Germany.

A note regarding LLMs in our teaching: We hold the old-fashioned belief that students need to work themselves in order to learn something (which is the purpose of teaching). We therefore do not tolerate any use of LLMs whatsoever in our seminars and BSc/MSc theses.

Here you can see groups of people overlapping with FAI, engaging in activities mostly unrelated to the research of FAI:

Curious what we do in this research group?

Refer to our Research page, which gives a summary of our research along with some examples.

For a scientific-yet-fun (so far as that is possible) exposition of AI Planning, read this:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Planning (But Were Afraid to Ask)

News.

• Anwesha Das has received the Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS'26 for her paper (co-authored by Jörg Hoffmann from FAI):

  Planning Ahead with RSA: Efficient Signalling in Dynamic Environments by Projecting User Awareness across Future Timesteps

• Joerg Hoffmann has received the Influential Paper Award at ICAPS'26, for the paper "Who Said we Need to Relax All Variables?" published together with Michael Katz and Carmel Domshlak at ICAPS'13.

• Pascal Lauer has received the Best Student Paper Award at ICAPS'26, for his paper:

  I Always Told My Mom That Order Is Overrated: Unordered HTN Planning is in PSPACE and Models Problems Beyond STRIPS

• Songtuan Lin has received the Best Student Paper Award at SoCS'24 for the following paper (co-authored by Daniel Höller from FAI):

  Modeling Assistance for Hierarchical Planning: An Approach for Correcting Hierarchical Domains with Missing Actions

• Daniel Höller is co-winner of the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2024 !

• Daniel Fišer has received the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at ICAPS'23, for his paper

  Operator Pruning using Lifted Mutex Groups via Compilation on Lifted Level

• FAI (co-)authored three planning systems that participated in the HTN tracks of the 2023 International Planning Competition (IPC), the TOAD system and two systems based on PANDA. The PANDA-based systems won 4 out of 6 tracks, and further were runner-up in 5 out of 6 tracks. Check the results here.
• Together with co-authors from Dresden, we have received the Best Paper Award at the 26th International Conference on Information Visualisation (IV'22), for our paper

  Glyph-Based Visual Analysis of Q-Learning Based Action Policy Ensembles on Racetrack

• Thorsten Klößner has received the Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award at ICAPS'22, for his paper

  Cost Partitioning Heuristics for Stochastic Shortest Path Problems

• Daniel Gnad is co-winner of the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2022 !

• Daniel Fišer, Álvaro Torralba, and Jörg Hoffmann received an Outstanding Paper Award, Honorable Mention at AAAI'22, for their paper

  Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search

• Thorsten Klößner has received the Best Student Paper Award at SOCS'21, for his paper

  Pattern Databases for Stochastic Shortest Path Problems

• In 2022, Joerg Hoffmann has been elected Fellow of AAAI, the U.S. Association for the Advancement of AI; as well as Fellow of EurAI, the European Association for AI.

• Joerg Hoffmann has received a Distinguished Senior Program Committee (SPC) Member Award at IJCAI'19, and the Best Senior Program Committee (SPC) Member Award at ICAPS'19.

• Thanks for the Busy Beaver Award for basic courses, given to the summer-term 2018 Programmierung 2 course we ran together with Prof. Sebastian Hack and the Compiler Design Lab!

• Our group has won two awards at the 9th International Planning Competition (IPC'18), namely the
  Runner-Up in the sequential agile track, and Runner-Up in the sequential bounded-cost track for our planning system SaarPlan by Maximilian Fickert, Daniel Gnad, and Patrick Speicher (and Joerg Hoffmann, in a theoretical sense).
  

• Daniel Gnad and co-authors won the Best Paper Award at the 25th International Symposium on Model Checking of Software (SPIN'18), for their paper

  Star-Topology Decoupling in SPIN

• Joerg Hoffmann has received the Outstanding Senior Program Committee (SPC) Member Award at AAAI'18.

• Joerg Hoffmann has received a Honorable Mention for the Influential Paper Award at ICAPS'17, for a seminal work co-authored with Ronen Brafman (Ben-Gurion University, Israel), introducing heuristic search techniques for planning under uncertainty.

• The 2nd price winner in the 2016 RoboCup@Work competition, a robot team named b-it bots@Work, uses our Mercury planner, an FD-based partial delete-relaxation planner (using a red-black planning heuristic function) developed by Michael Katz while he was at FAI. Mercury is used for high-level task planning in the robot, see a system description here.

  The RoboCup@Work competition is a challenge for human-robot production systems towards the Industry 4.0 vision. The use of Mercury here is part of a larger trend bringing AI Planning and Robotics -- which developed largely independently for several decades -- back together, in the quest for autonomous systems.

• Our group has won the 2nd prize at the 2016 Unsolvability International Planning Competition, where planners competed in proving that the goal is not reachable. Alvaro Torralba's BDD-based planner Sympa was the best-performing non-portfolio planner. It's been an interesting competition with lots of very different algorithms competing, including many developed in our group (merge-and-shrink abstraction, simulation-based dominance, star-topology decoupling, conflict-based conjunctions learning, red-black state space search). More to come ...

• Alvaro Torralba has won a Honorable Mention for the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2016!

• Jeanette Daum has received the Outstanding Student Paper Award at ICAPS'16, for our paper

  Practical Undoability Checking via Contingent Planning

• Alvaro Torralba and Peter Kissmann have received the Best Paper Award at SoCS'15, for their paper

  Focusing on What Really Matters: Irrelevance Pruning in Merge-and-Shrink

• Joerg Hoffmann has given an Invited Talk at ICAPS'15, on

  Simulated Penetration Testing: From "Dijkstra" to "Turing Test++"

• Our group has won various awards at the 2014 International Planning Competition, namely both the 1st Prize and the Runner-Up in the sequential optimal track (Alvaro Torrala, Peter Kissmann, and co-workers), the Runner-Up in the sequential satisficing track (Michael Katz and Joerg Hoffmann), and an Innovative Planner Award (Michael Katz and Joerg Hoffmann). Also, you can watch an interesting video here.

• Thanks for the Busy Beaver Award for core and advanced courses, given to our winter term 2013/14 Automatic Planning course!

• Joerg Hoffmann has received the Influential Paper Award at ICAPS'13, for the seminal work introducing landmarks, co-authored with Julie Porteous and Laura Sebastia at ECP'01. In the award lecture, he sang a song about landmarks, a video of which you can watch here. You can also just have a look at the talk slides:

  Landmarks, the Universe, and Everything

• Joerg Hoffmann and Michael Katz gave an invited lecture at the 2013 International Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling, entitled It's a Long Way to the Goal, But How Long Exactly? An Overview of Advanced Results on Distance Estimation in Planning.

• Joerg Hoffmann has contributed a feature video on heuristic search planning to a Coursera MOOC on planning. You can watch the video on YouTube.

• We won the Best Paper Award at ICAPS'12:

  Semi-Relaxed Plan Heuristics

• As of lately, Joerg Hoffmann is a consultant of Core Security and part of their Core Security INSIGHT Advisory Council. They use planning software for "penetration testing", which involves the automatic generation of hacker attacks, thus helping companies to find vulnerabilities in their network. In their current product, the attacks are planned using a variant of our planning system Metric-FF.

• Joerg Hoffmann gave an invited talk at KI'11, the 2011 German conference on Artificial Intelligence. He was also invited to write a paper:

  Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Planning (But Were Afraid to Ask)

  ... it's easy reading and fun, so if you don't know what planning is but would like to, have a look! You can also have a look at the slides.

• Papers on a tool called TorchLight have been published in JAIR and at ICAPS'11 (in this order :-) TorchLight analyzes h+ search space topology without actually running any search.

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