Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

• A paper on non-stationary policies for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes written by Boris Lesner and Bruno Scherrer (see Section  6.1.9 for more details) was accepted at NIPS'2012 with a full oral presentation (1467 papers were submitted, 370 were accepted for publication, among which only 20 were selected for full oral presentation).

• The Cartomatic projet which was part of the French robotics contest Defi CAROTTE organized by the General Delegation for Armaments (DGA) and French National Research Agency (ANR), has won the third and final edition of the contest. The aim of the Cart-O-matic project was to design and build a multi-robot system able to autonomously map an unknown building and to recognize various objects inside. The scientific issues of this project deal with Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), multi-robot collaboration, and object recognition and classification. The research teams involved in this project have developed innovative approaches to each of these fields.

• The paper “MOMDPs: a Solution for Modelling Adaptive Management Problems”, cosigned by Olivier Buffet has won the best paper award in this year’s Special Track on Computational Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) conference in Toronto.

• Emil Keyder, Joerg Hoffmann and Patrik Haslum (ANU/NICTA) won the best paper award of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS-12) for their paper “Semi-Relaxed Plan Heuristics” [24] .