Michael Katz

Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (FAI) Group

I am currently a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science, Saarland University, Germany, continuing my postdoc at the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA), Nancy, France, both hosted by Prof. Jörg Hoffmann.

Before that I was a postdoc at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, in the Faculty of Industrial Engineering & Management. During that time among other things, I was working on FP7 project called NisB, which brings together partners from academia (Technion, EPFL, HSG) and industry (SAP, CRF, TXT, Momentum).

My PhD studies were done in the field of Artificial Intelligence under the supervision of Prof. Carmel Domshlak.

My PhD Thesis Implicit Abstraction Heuristics for Cost-Optimal Planning was the winner of the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2011.
A brief summary of my PhD Thesis was published in AI Communications Journal. These two pages of comparatively light reading present the general idea of my thesis.


The main focus of my current work is classical automated planning, both satisficing and cost-optimal. The prefered method of solving classical planning problems is heuristic search in the problem's state space. My main work focuses on automatic derivation of heuristic functions for classical planning.

In general, I am interested in several adjacent areas, such as Autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI), general (domain independent) problem solving, planning and planning complexity, constraint satisfaction and optimization, combinatorics and graph algorithms.

To get a general impression of what kind of things I am interested in, you can take a brief look at the articles I am partially responsible for.