Álvaro Torralba
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   About me    Publications    Research Activities    Software    Projects    Teaching   DEIS
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  • In the 2023 International Planning Competition we received the First and Second Prizes in the Learning Track with GOFAI and HUZAR planners. Curious about the results? Check the IPC webpage!


  • In the 2023 International Planning Competition we received the First Prize in the "Agile Track" with DecStar-2023 planner. Curious about the results? Check the IPC webpage!


  • I gave an invited talk for the "New Faculty Highlights" at AAAI'23 with title: "Reshaping State-Space Search: From Dominance to Contrastive Analysis" . The talk will be published soon. For the moment, enjoy the paper !


  • Our paper "Additive Pattern Databases for Decoupled Search" received the Best Paper Award at SoCS'22. You can read the paper here.


  • I was interviewed by AIhub in relation to the Award we received in AAAI'22 for the paper "Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search" . You can read the interview and learn something more about the paper at the AIhub webpage.


  • Our paper "Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search" received an Outstanding Paper Award, Honorable Mention at AAAI'22, probably the most prestigious conference in Artificial Intelligence!

    If you are curious, check the CS-news article about the paper. You can also check the paper here.

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    I am currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Denmark, within the Distributed, Embedded, and Intelligent Systems (DEIS) Unit. I received my Bachelor and Master diploma in Computer Science from the University Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), and completed my PhD at the same University in 2015. (PLG Group) From 2014 until 2020 I worked as a Post-Doc researcher at Saarland University (Germany), in the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence Group, hosted by Prof. Jörg Hoffmann; and on CISPA, the Helmholtz Center of Information Security.

    For more information, consult my CV

    I research on Artificial Intelligence, and within it, the main area of my research is Automated Planning, with special focus in Classical Planning. My interests extend to other related Artificial Intelligence areas such as heuristic search in combinatorial domains, machine learning, general game playing and problem solving, constraint satisfaction and optimization, etc.

    Why is Automated Planning so interesting?

    Since the very beginning in Artificial Intelligence, there was the ambitious goal of constructing a general problem solver that could provide solutions to any given problem. Automated Planning follows the same principle, for problems where the task is to “find a sequence of actions” (basically make a plan). The goal is to construct a planner that can provide us with efficient solutions in many applications, from deciding what is the best route to deliver packages in a Logistics company, finding the best way to build a complex structure, or finding vulnerabilities on a computer network.



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  • Distinguished Program Committee Member at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'23) (2023).

  • Recognize member of the Program Committee Member, receiving the following awards: The “Discussion Master” award and The “Personally commended” in at 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI’23) (2023).

  • First Prize of the Learning Track of the 4th international planning competition (IPC’23) with "GOFAI" planner, (joint work with Daniel Gnad) (2023)

  • Runner-Up Prize of the Learning Track of the 4th international planning competition (IPC’23) with "HUZAR" planner, (joint work with Piotr Rafal Gzubicki and Bartosz Piotr Lachowicz) (2023)

  • First Prize of the agile track of the 10th international planning competition (IPC’23) with "DecStar-2023" planner, (joint work with Daniel Gnad and Alexander Shleyfman) (2023)

  • Distinguished Program Committee Member (distinguised 3% of reviewers) at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI’22) (2022).

  • SoCS'22 Best Paper Award for the paper "Additive Pattern Databases for Decoupled Search", co-authored with S. Sievers and D. Gnad.

  • AAAI'22 Outstanding Paper Award: Honorable Mention. for the paper "Operator-Potential Heuristics for Symbolic Search", co-authored with D. Fišer and J. Hoffmann.

  • Distinguished Program Committee Member (Level 2) at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI’18) (Top 33 out of 2016 reviewers) (2018).

  • Honorable Mention in ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2016. at International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (London, UK. 2016). See the talk here.

  • ICAPS 2016 Outstanding Student Paper Award. for the paper "Practical Undoability Checking via Contingent Planning", co-authored with J. Daum, J. Hoffmann, P. Haslum, and I. Weber at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (London, UK. 2016). See the talk here.

  • Second Place in the 1st Unsolvability International Planning Competition (IPC’16) with SymPA planner (best-performing non-portfolio planner) (2016) .See the awards talk here.

  • Best Paper Award at the 8th Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS’15). For the paper "Focusing on What Really Matters: Irrelevance Pruning in Merge-and-Shrink", co-authored with Peter Kissmann (2015)

  • First Prize (Winner with 2 Planners) of the sequential-optimal track of the 8th international planning competition (IPC’14) with SymBA* planner, (joint work with Vidal Alcázar, Peter Kissmann, Stefan Edelkamp and Daniel Borrajo) (2014)

  • Second Prize of the sequential-optimal track of the 8th international planning competition (IPC’14) with cGamer planner, (joint work with Vidal Alcázar, Peter Kissmann, and Stefan Edelkamp) (2014)

  • Best Paper Award at the 6th Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS’13). For the paper Constrained Symbolic Search: On Mutexes, BDD Minimization and More , co-authored with Vidal Alcázar. (2013)