Conference: Student Support for the 2024 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024)

This grant supports travel for US-based students selected to participate in the Doctoral Mentoring Consortium (DMC) and Summer School at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024), to be held in Banff, Alberta, Canada, June 2024. This is the first in-person ICAPS summer school since 2018. ICAPS is the premier international conference for researchers in automated planning and scheduling. As AI systems become more prevalent, it is clear that advances in planning and scheduling will have significant impact in many high-stake domains, including transportation, smart-grids, robotics, and healthcare. The DMC creates an opportunity to engage students who might not have attended an AI conference due to lack of resources. This will draw more talent into AI research, improve research ideas in their formative stage, and engender collaborations across the breadth of disciplines. This event provides students with invaluable exposure to outside perspectives on their work at a critical time in their research and enables them to explore their career objectives. The central activities for the DMC include opportunities for students to present and discuss their work with their peers; interaction with an identified group of senior researchers for advice on Ph.D. research; and opportunities for interactions with the international research community in AI, which might lead to future collaborative activity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.