[robotics-worldwide] CFP: The Fourth International Symposium on Combinatorial Search with Focus on Path Planning

[Maxim Likhachev]

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Fifth installment of The International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS)
Special Topic This Year: Path Planning Competition

http://www.socs12.org

Dates:  July 19, 2012 - July 21, 2012


Submission Dates:

Submission deadline: April 15, 2012
Notification: May 15, 2012
Camera-ready version due: June 1, 2012


Location:

SoCS will be co-located with AAAI'12 conference and will take place in 
Niagara Falls near Toronto (Canada) and Buffalo (New York). Limited bus 
shuttle services from/to the airport and to AAAI will be provided.


Description:

Heuristic search and other forms of combinatorial search are currently 
very active areas of research in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 
Planning and other areas of Computer Science.  The International Symposium 
on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) is meant to bring researchers in such areas 
together to exchange their ideas and cross-fertilize the field. SoCS is 
targeting researchers and submissions in all fields that use combinatorial 
search, including artificial intelligence, planning, robotics, constraint 
programming, operations research and bioinformatics. Overall, the main 
focus of SoCS is on the design of novel heuristic search methods, analysis 
of existing heuristic search methods and their applications.


This year, SoCS'12 will include a special session on path planning and 
will be hosting the 2012 Grid-Based Path Planning Competition (GPPC) 
organized by Nathan Sturtevant. Each competition entry will have a 
lightly-reviewed 1-page description in the SoCS proceedings. We invite all 
researchers who use grid-based search to participate in the competition 
and/or submit their work to SoCS'12. We are also interested in position 
papers covering various aspects of grid-based search.


Submission:

Submissions should report on substantial, original and new research. We 
also encourage submissions of position papers which are intended for the 
discussion of ideas and concepts related to heuristic search. Examples 
would be thoughtful critiques of the field, historical perspectives and 
analysis, methodological contributions, insightful reports on new and 
demanding applications, and papers related to the special topic of this 
year conference. Submissions will be carefully peer-reviewed by multiple 
reviewers.

Submissions should be in AAAI format and up to 8 pages long. SoCS has a 
formal archival proceedings but the authors will be able to opt for an 
"extended abstract-only" option in order to allow for publishing the 
full-length paper elsewhere.

In order to foster the exchange of ideas at SoCS, we also encourage the 
submission of papers describing new research which has been accepted to 
other venues. Such submissions will undergo a light reviewing process and, 
if accepted, will have a two-page abstract included in the archived 
proceedings.


Further submission information can be found at http://www.socs11.org.


SoCS-2011 chairs:

Daniel Borrajo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Richard Korf, University of California Los Angeles, USA
Maxim Likhachev, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Carlos Linares Lopez, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire, USA
Nathan Sturtevant, University of Denver, USA