Hi, I am Pascal.
In 2020 I received my B.Sc. at Saarland University.
I continued my studies at Saarland University and obtained my M.Sc. in 2022.
I am now a PhD student in a Dual PhD arrangement between Saarland University (at the chair of Prof. Dr. Jörg Hoffmann)
and Australian National University (supervised and supported through a scholarship by Dr. Pascal Bercher).
While there is no institutional affiliation, I am grateful for the additional supervision by Assoc. Prof. Dr. รlvaro Torralba at Aalborg University, which started during my BSc thesis and persists to this day.
I work in the field of Planning, i.e. symbolic sequential decision making, with a primary emphasis on heuristic search.
I am intrigued by the underlying challenges in the field, and especially by trying to compute a fast and informative heuristic.
The trade-off between informativeness and runtime of a heuristic presents very interesting challenges, both from a human/explanatory perspective and a more theoretical algorithmic perspective.
My PhD thesis is centered in a sub-discipline known as Lifted Planning.
In this research, I explore a shift from the commonly used propositional (grounded) formulation found in most successful planning approaches
to the first-order logic (lifted) formulation typically used to describe planning tasks in practice.
This shift introduces unique challenges and allows to overcome obstacles that propositional approaches are not able to.
The transformation trade-off from first-order to propositional formulations precisely captures the
trade-off between speed and informativeness at the knowledge representation level.
For now I concentrate on classical planning and hierarchical planning formalisms, although I believe that the main ideas generalize to a broader context.
P. Lauer,
M. Fickert, Beating LM-cut with LM-cut: Quick Cutting and Practical Tie Breaking for the Precondition Choice Function, Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Heuristic Search for Domain-Independent Planning (HSDIP'20), at ICAPS'20.
(PDF, BibTex, Talk)
I was an organizer of the tutor didactics seminar for Programming 2 (2021), Software Engineering Lab (2021), Programming 2 (2022), Programming 2/CySec 2 (2023), Software Engineering Lab (2023).
I volunteered in the Mathematics Preparatory Course 2018(๐).