Prof. Blai Bonet Matemáticas y Sistemas, 215-A Departamento de Computación Universidad Simón Bolívar Caracas 89000, Venezuela bonet AT ldc DOT usb DOT ve Tel: +58 (212) 906-3263 Fax: +58 (212) 906-3243 Web: http://www.ldc.usb.ve/~bonet

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Research Interests

• Decision-theoretic planning: STRIPS, non-deterministic, probabilistic, incomplete information, ...
• Heuristic search: algorithms and heuristics
• Knowledge representation: propositional, compilation, reasoning, tractable subclasses, ...
• Graphical models: Bayesian nets, MRFs, causal networks, algorithms, relations to KR/compilation, ...
• Theoretical aspects of Computer Science

Professional Services and Activities

• Associate Editor of Bulletin of Computational Applied Mathematics (CompAMa)
• Associate Editor of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 2012-2015
• Member of Executive Council of ICAPS 2012-2018
• Conference Co-Chair ICAPS-2012
• Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence (AIJ) 2011-date
• Workshops Co-Chair ICAPS-2011
• Head of the Computer Science Department 2009-2011
• Editorial Board of Artificial Intelligence 2009-2011
• Tutorial Chair for ICAPS-2008
• Editorial Board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) 2007-2010
• Co-Organizer of the workshop Heuristics for Domain-independent Planning: Progress, Ideas, Limitations, Challenges at ICAPS 2007.
• Co-Organizer of 5th International Planning Competition held at ICAPS'06 in Cumbria, UK.
• Major Conferences: IJCAI 2001-2013, AAAI 2005-2013, ECAI'06-08, ICAPS 2005-2013, UAI 2002-2009, 2011.
• Journals: J. of Artificial Intelligence Research, Artificial Intelligence, J. of Automated Reasoning, Computational Intelligence, J. of Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics.

Teaching

• CI2511 - Symbolic Logic: F06
• CI2525 - (former CI2523) Discrete Math I (Combinatorics): F05,07-09, W07-08,11,13, S04-05
• CI2526 - Discrete Math II (Set Theory): S13
• CI2693 - Lab Algorithms III: S10
• CI3725 - Automata Theory: F03-04, W04, S07
• CI5437 - Introduction to AI (I & II): F05,12, S05-08
• CI7431 - Knowledge Representation (grad): F06, W05, S09
• CI7541 - Theory of Computation (grad): W04-11
• CI7621 - Theory of Algorithms (grad): F10, F12

Publications

1. Causal Belief Decomposition for Planning with Sensing: Completeness and Practical Approximation (pdf)
   Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
   Proc. 23rd Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Beijing, China. 2013. To appear.
2. An Admissible Heuristic for SAS+ Planning Obtained from the State Equation (pdf)
   Blai Bonet.
   Proc. 23rd Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Beijing, China. 2013. To appear.
   Also accepted in the ICAPS-13 Workshop Heuristics and Search for Domain-independent Planning (HSDIP).
3. Automatic Reductions from PH into STRIPS or How to Generate Short Problems with Long Solutions (pdf)
   Aldo Porco, Alejandro Machado and Blai Bonet.
   Proc. 23rd Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Rome, Italy. 2013. To appear.
4. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS)
   Lee McCluskey, Brian Williams, José Reinaldo Silva, Blai Bonet (Eds.).
   Atibaia, São Paulo, Brazil, June 25-19, 2012. AAAI Press. ISBN 978-1-57735-562-5.
5. Action Selection for MDPs: Anytime AO* vs. UCT (pdf) (slides) (AAAI)
   Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
   Proc. 26th AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Toronto, Canada. 2012. Pages 1749-1755.
6. Width and Complexity of Belief Tracking in Non-deterministic Conformant and Contingent Planning (pdf) (slides) (AAAI)
   Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
   Proc. 26th AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Toronto, Canada. 2012. Pages 1756-1762.
7. Syntactic Characterizations of Completeness using Duals and Operators (pdf)
   Blai Bonet and Nerio Borges.
   Logic Journal of IGPL 20(1) 2012. Oxford University Press. Pages 266-282.
8. Planning under Partial Observability by Classical Replanning: Theory and Experiments (pdf) (poster)
   Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
   Proc. 22nd Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Barcelona, Spain. 2011. Pages 1936-1941.
9. Automatic Polytime Reductions of NP Problems into a Fragment of STRIPS (pdf) (slides)
   Aldo Porco, Alejandro Machado and Blai Bonet.
   Proc. 21st Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Freiburg, Germany. 2011. Pages 178-185.
10. Abstraction Heuristics Extended with Counting Abstractions (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 21st Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Freiburg, Germany. 2011. Pages 311-314.
11. A Complete Algorithm for Generating Landmarks (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet and Julio Castillo.
    Proc. 21st Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Freiburg, Germany. 2011. Pages 315-318.
12. STEREO: a SaT-based tool for an optimal solution of the sERvice selEctiOn problem (urn)
    Daniel Izquierdo, María Esther Vidal and Blai Bonet.
    Demo paper in 9th Int. Semantic Web Conf. (ISWC). Shanghai, China. 2010. CEUR-WS.org, Vol-658. Pages 205-208.
13. An Expressive and Efficient Solution to the Service Selection Problem (pdf)
    Daniel Izquierdo, María Esther Vidal and Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 9th Int. Semantic Web Conf. (ISWC). Shanghai, China. 2010. Springer LNCS 6496. Pages 386-401.
14. Strengthening Landmark Heuristics via Hitting Sets (Best Paper Award) (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet and Malte Helmert.
    Proc. 19th European Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI). Lisbon, Portugal. 2010. Pages 329-334.
15. Finite-State Controllers Based on Mealy Machines for Centralized and Decentralized POMDPs (pdf)
    Christopher Amato, Blai Bonet and Shlomo Zilberstein.
    Proc. 24th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Atlanta, GA. 2010. AAAI Press. Pages 1052-1058.
16. Automatic Derivation of Finite-State Machines for Behavior Control (Nectar Track) (pdf)
    Blai Bonet, Héctor Palacios and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 24th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Atlanta, GA. 2010. AAAI Press. Pages 1656-1659.
17. Heuristic Search for Planning under Uncertainty
    Blai Bonet and Eric A. Hansen.
    Chapter in Heuristics, Probability and Causality: A Tribute to Judea Pearl.
    College Publications. 2010. Pages 3-22.
18. Conformant Plans and Beyond: Principles and Complexity (doi)
    Blai Bonet.
    Artificial Intelligence 174 (2010). Elsevier. Pages 245-269.
19. Automatic Derivation of Memoryless Policies and Finite-State Controllers Using Classical Planners. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet, Héctor Palacios and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 19th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Thessaloniki, Greece. 2009. Pages 34-41.
20. Deterministic POMDPs Revisited. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 25th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Montreal, Canada. 2009. Pages 59-66.
21. Solving POMDPs: RTDP-Bel bs. Point-based Algorithms. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 21st Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Pasadena, California. 2009. AAAI Press. Pages 1641-1646.
22. Directed Unfolding of Petri Nets. (pdf) (doi)
    Blai Bonet, Patrik Haslum, Sarah Hickmott and Sylvie Thiébaux.
    Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency I. 2008. Springer LNCS 5100. Pages 172-198.
23. Heuristics for Planning with Penalties and Rewards Formulated in Logic and Computed through Circuits (doi)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Artificial Intelligence 172 (2008). Elsevier. Pages 1579-1604.
24. Efficient Algorithms to Rank and Unrank Permutations in Lexicographic Order (pdf) (poster)
    Blai Bonet.
    Workshop on Search in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at AAAI 2008.
25. Multiple Symmetries in Sliding-Tile Puzzles: First Experiments. (pdf)
    Cesar Romero, Julio Castillo, Blai Bonet.
    Workshop on Search in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at AAAI 2008.
26. Logical Encodings With No Time Indexes for Defining and Computing Admissible Heuristics for Planning. (pdf)
    Miquel Ramirez, Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Workshop on Heuristics for Domain-independent Planning: Progress, Ideas, Limitations, Challenges at ICAPS 2007.
27. On the Speed of Convergence of Value Iteration on Stochastic Shortest-Path Problems. (for pdf send email)
    Blai Bonet.
    Mathematics of Operations Research 32 (2007). INFORMS. Pages 365-373.
28. Directed Unfolding of Petri Nets. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet, Patrik Haslum, Sarah Hickmott and Sylvie Thiébaux.
    Workshop on Unfolding and Partial Order Techniques (UFO) in 28th Int. Conf. on Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency. Siedlce, Poland. 2007.
29. External Memory Value Iteration. (pdf)
    Stefan Edelkamp, Shahid Jabbar and Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 17th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Providence, USA. 2007. Pages 128-135.
    Also as Technical Report 813, University of Dortmund, April 2007.
30. On Canonical Forms of Complete Problems via First-Order Projections.
    Nerio Borges and Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 9th Int. Workshop on Logic and Computational Complexity (LCC). Wroclaw, Poland. 2007.
31. Domain-Independent Construction of Pattern Database Heuristics for Cost-Optimal Planning. (pdf)
    Patrik Haslum, Adi Botea, Malte Helmert, Blai Bonet and Sven Koenig.
    Proc. 22nd National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Vancouver, Canada. 2007. AAAI Press. Pages 1007-1012.
32. 5th International Planning Competition. (pdf)
    Alfonso Gerevini, Blai Bonet and Robet Givan (Eds).
    Held in conjunction with 16th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Cumbria, UK. 2006.
33. Compilation of Query-Rewriting Problems into Tractable Fragments of Propositional Logic. (pdf) (slides)
    Yolife Arvelo, Blai Bonet and Maria Esther Vidal.
    Proc. 21st National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Boston, MA. 2006. AAAI Press. Pages 225-230.
34. Heuristics for Planning with Penalties and Rewards using Compiled Knowledge. (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 10th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR). Cumbria, UK. 2006. AAAI Press. Pages 452-462.
35. Learning Depth-First Search: A Unified Approach to Heuristic Search in Deterministic and Non-Deterministic Settings, and its application to MDPs. (Best Research-Paper Award) (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 16th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Cumbria, UK. 2006. AAAI Press. Pages 142-151.
36. Bounded Branching and Modalities in Non-Deterministic Planning. (pdf) (slides) (UPF-slides)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 16th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Cumbria, UK. 2006. AAAI Press. Pages 42-51.
    Invited Talk at Symposium AIM-06, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
37. mGPT: A Probabilistic Planner Based on Heuristic Search. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 24 (2005). Pages 933-944.
38. New Admissible Heuristics for Domain-Independent Planning. (pdf)
    Patrik Haslum, Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 20th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Pittsburgh, PA. 2005. AAAI Press. Pages 1163-1168.
39. An Algorithm Better than AO*?. (pdf) (Poster)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 20th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Pittsburgh, PA. 2005. AAAI Press. Pages 1343-1348.
    Proc. IJCAI-05 Workshop on Planning and Learning in A Priori Unknown or Dynamic Domains. Edinburgh, UK. 2005. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 83-89.
40. Learning in Depth-First Search: A Unified Approach to Heuristic Search in Deterministic, Non-Deterministic, Probabilistic, and Game Tree Settings. (pdf) (slides)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Universidad Simon Bolivar. Technical Report 2005. Copyright.
41. Pruning Conformant Plans by Counting Models on Compiled d-DNNF Representations. (pdf) (slides)
    Héctor Palacios, Blai Bonet, Adnan Darwiche, Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 15th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Monterey, California. 2005. AAAI Press. Pages 141-150.
42. mGPT: A Probabilistic Planner based on Heuristic Search. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    1st International Probabilistic-Planning Competition in 14th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Banff, Canada. 2004.
43. Faster Heuristic Search Algorithms for Planning with Uncertainty and Full Feedback. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 18th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Acapulco, Mexico. 2003. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 1233-1238.
44. Labeled RTDP: Improving the Convergence of Real-Time Dynamic Programming. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 13th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Trento, Italy. 2003. AAAI Press. Pages 12-21.
45. GPT meets PSR. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Sylvie Thiébaux.
    Proc. 13th Int. Conf. on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). Trento, Italy. 2003. AAAI Press. Pages 102-111.
46. Qualitative MDPs and POMDPs: An Order-Of-Magnitude Approach. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Judea Pearl.
    Proc. 18th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Edmonton, Canada. 2002. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 61-68.
47. Solving Stochastic Shortest-Path Problems with RTDP. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Universidad Simon Bolivar. Technical Report 2002. Copyright.
48. An epsilon-Optimal Grid-Based Algorithm for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 19th Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML). Sydney, Australia. 2002. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 51-58.
49. Instrumentality Tests Revisited. (Runner-up Student-Paper Award) (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 17th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Seattle, WA. 2001. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 48-55.
50. A Calculus for Causal Relevance. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet.
    Proc. 17th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Seattle, WA. 2001. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 40-47.
51. GPT: A Tool for Planning with Uncertainty and Partial Information. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Workshop on Planning with Uncertainty and Partial Information, Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). Seattle, WA. 2001. Pages 82-87.
52. Heuristic Search Planner Ver. 2.0. (Description of Planner entered into AIPS-00 Competition) (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    AI Magazine. Fall 2001. Pages 77-80.
53. Planning As Heuristic Search. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Artificial Intelligence 129 (2001). Elsevier. Pages 5-33.
54. Planning and Control in Artificial Intelligence: A Unifying Perspective. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Applied Intelligence 14 (2001). Kluwer. Pages 237-252.
55. Planning with Incomplete Information as Heuristic Search in Belief Space. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on AI Planning and Scheduling (AIPS). Breckenridge, CO. 2000. AAAI Press. Pages 52-61.
56. The AIPS-98 Planning Competition.
    D. Long, H. Kautz, B. Selman, B. Bonet, H. Geffner, J. Koehler, M. Brenner, J. Hoffmann, F. Rittinger, C. Anderson, D. Weld, D. Smith and M. Fox.
    AI Magazine 21(2): 13-33, 2000.
57. Planning as Heuristic Search: New Results. (ICAPS-09 Influential Paper Award) (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 5th European Conf. on Planning (ECP). Durham, UK. 1999. Springer LNCS 1809. Pages 359-371.
58. HSP: Heuristic Search Planner. (pdf)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    First description of HSP at the AIPS-98 Planning Competition, Pittsburgh 6/98.
59. High-Level Planning and Control with Incomplete Information Using POMDPs. (pdf)
    Héctor Geffner and Blai Bonet.
    Proc. Fall AAAI Symposium on Cognitive Robotics, 1998. Orlando, FL.
60. Solving Large POMDPs by Real Time Dynamic Programming. (pdf)
    Héctor Geffner and Blai Bonet.
    Proc. Fall AAAI Symposium on POMDPS. 1998. Orlando, FL.
61. Learning Sorting and Decision Trees with POMDPs. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 15th Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML). Madison, WI. 1998. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 73-81.
62. A Fast and Robust Action Selection Mechanism for Planning. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet, Gábor Loerincs, and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 14th National Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Providence, RI. 1997. AAAI Press. Pages 714-719.
63. Arguing for Decisions: A Qualitative Model of Decision Making. (pdf) (BibTeX)
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. 12th Conf. on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). Portland, OR. 1996. Morgan Kaufmann. Pages 98-105.
64. Causal Reasoning with Domain Constraints.
    Blai Bonet and Héctor Geffner.
    Proc. XXI Conf. Latinoamericana de Informatica. Canela, Brasil. 1995. Pages 767-778.

Tutorials et al.

• UC3M-2012 Talks: Probabilistic Planning (slides) Petri Nets (ICAPS-11 slides)
• Summer School ICAPS-2011: Probabilistic Planning (slides superseded by UC3M 2012 Talks)
• Tutorial ICAPS-2011: Petri Nets (w/ P. Haslum) (slides)
• Tutorial ICAPS-2009: Unfolding & Petri Nets (w/ P. Haslum, S. Hickmott, S. Thiébaux and S. Edelkamp) (slides)

Software

• belief-tracking: Engine and examples for belief tracking in planning with sensing. A movie showing an fully-autonomous agent using the belief-tracking algorithm to play minesweeper can be seen here.
• mdp-engine: Various algorithms for MDPs, including Anytime AO* and UCT from AAAI-12 paper.
• k_replanner: Replanner for Planning under Partial Observability (IJCAI-11).
• np2pddl: Automatic reductions of NP problems into STRIPS problems (ICAPS-11).
• cp2fsc: Automatic derivation of FSCs (ICAPS-09).
• gpt-rewards: GPT/rewards: solver for reward-based discounted POMDPs based on RTDP-Bel (IJCAI-09).
• mcdsat: McdSat/Minicon for QRPs (AAAI-06).
• dnnf-models: Model Enumerator for d-DNNF theories.
• mini-gpt: Planner used in the probabilistic track of IPC-4.
• LDFS+ (v.07.16.07): Learning in Depth-First Search; code used in ICAPS'06 paper".
• LDFS (v.05.10.04): Learning in Depth-First Search; code used in "An Algorithm Better Than AO*?".
• hsp-planners: The HSP family of planners.
• asp-planner: LRTA* Planner; see AAAI-97 paper.
• GPT Source (v.2.00 04/21/08)