Dr. Florian Pommerening receives this year's faculty price of the Faculty of Science
Every year at Dies Academicus the faculties award prizes to young researchers for outstanding dissertations. This year's faculty prize of the Faculty of Science, donated by Adobe Research (Schweiz) AG, is awarded to Dr. Florian Pommerening and Dr. Silvia Domcke.
Dr. Florian Pommerening receives the faculty prize for his pioneering work in his PhD thesis «New perspectives on cost partitioning for optimal classical planning», which establishes fundamental theoretical links between two central research topics of Artificial Intelligence. Florian Pommerening's thesis is concerned with the question how complex AI planning tasks can be solved efficiently and optimally without having to tailor the solution algorithm to any particular application domain and without having to perform any training or learning. It shows how methods from mathematical optimization can be used to fully automate the synthesis of problem-specific solution approaches (heuristics) for intelligent problem solving based on an abstract problem description.
Florian Pommerening's dissertation has also been distinguished with the EurAI Dissertation Award for 2017. This award annually recognizes the best PhD thesis in the area of Artificial Intelligence that has been produced in Europe in the preceding calendar year.
Furthermore the thesis was recognized in June 2018 with the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2018, a worldwide award which is annually given to the strongest PhD thesis in the area of automated planning and scheduling.