[Apologies if you receive this CFP multiple times]

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                      FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS
          The ICAPS 2009 Workshop on Planning and Learning
                       Thessaloniki, Greece
                       September 20th, 2009 
            http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/learning-icaps09/                                                 

Workshop Description:
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Progress in planning research faces the perennial battle of how to provide effective search guidance, marred further by the aim to produce domain-independent systems with heuristics and algorithms that are effective in many classes of problems. Great progress has been made in these areas, and several successful approaches have emerged - useful domain-independent heuristics, landmarks analysis, novel propagators for use in a planning-as-CSP framework, to name but a few. Nonetheless, despite their elegance, they are invariably out-performed by systems able to exploit hand-crafted domain-specific search guidance. The drawback of such guidance, however, is the amount of human time needed to produce suitable guidance for each domain - the key motivation behind domain-indepdent approaches.

Between domain-independent search and hand-crafted domains-specific guidance lies the pragmatic stance of applying learning techniques to planning. The aim is to eliminate the human bottleneck by automating the process of determining domains-specific guidance. In doing so, the system as a whole becomes domain independent once again - the learning system can be used on each domain for which search guidance is desired. Assuming the learning time is reasonable for the task in hand, the system can then be used to find solutions exploiting this guidance without the user ever having to consider how it might be obtained.

In the past few years, learning in planning has re-emerged as a vibrant research area. Following the 2007 ICAPS workshop on Planning and Learning, a 'Learning Track' was organised for the subsequent 2008 International Planning Competition (IPC). The IPC tested the efficacy of the participating learning systems, producing an interesting collection of results.

This workshop provides a forum for discussing issues surrounding the use of learning techniques in planning, continuing the lineage of the events of ICAPS 2007 and 2008. The topics that will be covered include, but are not limited to:

    * Approaches to learning search guidance
    * Representation of learnt knowledge - control rules, heuristics, macro-actions...
    * Applying learning to portfolio-based planners
    * Hybrid learnt-guidance--generic-heuristic search
    * Learning for optimal planning
    * Applications of planning and learning
    * Lessons learnt from the 2008 IPC
    * Future Challenges for the IPC Learning Track

We invite contributions from researchers who have considered the application of learning to planning. Successful approaches are welcome, as well as negative results from which the community may learn. Further, details of many of the systems participating in the 2008 competition have yet to be published, and are of great community interest, so we welcome details of these systems. We also welcome theoretical contributions considering the expressive power and/or limitations of various forms of learnt knowledge representation. Additionally, we also welcome ideas for solving planning problems based around presently hand-crafted rules that may be amenable to learning approaches. 


Important Dates:
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    * Submission Deadline: 	June 23rd, 2009
    * Notifications and Technical Program: 	July 22nd, 2009
    * Camera-Ready Paper Submissions: 	Aug 8th, 2009
    * Edited Working Notes: 	August 9th, 2009
    * Workshop Date: 	September 20th, 2009


Submission Procedure:
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We ask authors to submit technical papers in PDF format. Papers should be formatted in accordance with the AAAI style template and may be at most 8 pages long, including figures and bibliography. Visit the url http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php for formatting instructions.

Please note that all submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by multiple reviewers, and that low-quality or off-topic papers will not be accepted. Also note that all workshop participants must register for the main ICAPS-09 conference

 Contact Information:
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    * Dr Andrew Coles
      Livingstone Tower
      Department of Computer and Information Sciences
      University of Strathclyde
      Glasgow, UK

    * Sergio Jiménez Celorrio
      Planning and Learning Group
      Computer Science Department
      Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
      Avda de la Universidad, 30
      28911 Leganés 
      Madrid (Spain)
      sjimenez@uc3m.es
      http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/~sjimenez


Program Commitee:
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