The 12th ICAPS Summer School

The Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling in 2024 will be the first in-person summer school since 2018 – after six long years!

When and Where?

The summer school will take place from 27 May 2024 to 31 May 2024 (5 full days), in Banff, the week before ICAPS. So if you plan to attend ICAPS, you could simply arrive one week earlier!

What?

It’s still one year until it takes place, so the exact program isn’t final yet. So far, it’s planned that the summer school consists of two lectures in the morning and hands-on lab sessions in the afternoon.

The summer school provides a comprehensive and incremental overview of frameworks for planning and sequential decision-making (classical planning, stochastic planning, partial observability, RL, etc.) while using integrated task and motion planning (TMP) as the underlying ‘running example’ or storyline. The lab sessions are designed to demonstrate ideas and theories discussed in the lectures. More concretely, the programme includes lectures presented by researchers from the ICAPS community in the morning, followed by hands-on laboratory activities taking examples from robotics-related applications (e.g. single- and multi-robot systems) that build upon material presented in the lectures.

Who can join? How and when to apply?

As of now, we have 40 (in-person) spots for participants. We hope that we can accommodate a higher number of participants, but it’s too early to confirm this. Our 40 spots are however already confirmed. The summer school is primarily intended for PhD students, but in principle post-docs are also eligible. If we have more applicants than spots (which at the moment seems to be the case) precedence will be given to PhD students.

Applications will likely open at some point in 2024. As we expect that many of those interested in the summer school will only be able to join if they have also a paper at the main conference, we plan to open applications shortly after the ICAPS notifications are sent, and try to have a short turnaround time for sending the notifications. We are asking in advance for your understanding in case you are not selected, because available spots are limited.

Costs and Sponsorships

It is still too early to provide concrete numbers as we are still in the process of acquiring sponsors. We try to keep the registration fee (which will include accommodation, breakfast, coffee breaks, lunch, and one dinner) as low as possible, and will also offer free registration to very low number of selected participants.

Organizing Team

The organizing team, sorted alphabetically by last name, consists of:

  • Pascal Bercher from the Australian National University, Australia – pascal.bercher at anu.edu.au, webpage
  • Sarah Keren from Technion, Israel – sarahk at technion.ac.il, webpage
  • Jane Jean Kiam from University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany – jane.kiam at unibw.de webpage

Sponsors

Here we will list all our sponsors that help(ed) making the summer school possible.

Platinum sponsorship (5000 CAD and above)    Gold sponsorship (2500 to 4999 CAD)    Silver sponsorship (1000 to 2499 CAD)
30 mins presentation15 mins presentation
2 poster1 poster
flyer and goodiesflyer and goodiesflyer and goodies
email-forwardemail-forward
networking packagenetworking packagenetworking package
large logo (and link) postedmid-sized logo (and link) postedsmall logo (and link) posted
additional requests, e.g., participation

Benefits explained:

  • All Silver benefits are included in the Gold benefits, all Gold benefits are included in the Platinum benefits (or slightly improved according to the table).
  • poster: You may send us 2 or 1 (Platinum vs Gold) poster up to size A0 directly to the venue. We will prominently display them during all 5 days of the summer school.
  • presentation: You may give a 30 or 15 minute (Platinum vs Gold) online presentation that our participants will attend (e.g. a pitch on the sponsor’s activities). This time does include a Q&A exchange with our participants.
  • flyer and goodies: You may send us an A5 PDF, two-sided, which we will print out and distribute to the participants. You may also send us (directly to the venue) some merchandise (pens, etc.) that we will distribute as well. (Consider that everybody will be traveling by plane, so space is restricted.)
  • email-forward: You may send us a single email (e.g., in style of a newsletter, announcement, etc.) which we will forward to our participants. (This way you can reach our participants even if they do not consent to make their contact details available.)
  • networking package: We will create a LinkedIn group and ask our participants to join (although this is voluntary). Our sponsors will join it too and can hence write an announcement or connect directly with our participants. We furthermore ask our participants for consent to make their contact data available to our sponsors (again this is voluntary). This data will contain their name, status (Master Student, PhD student, Post-Doc etc.), and email address.
  • logo: We will make your logo available in large, medium, or small size according to the sponsorship model. This logo will also contain a link to the sponsoring organization. These will be made available both on this (summer school) webpage, as well as on a dedicated summer school page in the ICAPS proceedings (not where the ICAPS sponsors are listed). In case we create some booklet of this summer school (which is not clear yet; but if we do, it will only be a PDF but not printed/formally published), sponsors will be added there as well.
  • additional requests: In the Platinum model, you may contact us organizers for any specific proposals (e.g., if you want to send a PhD student to participate), and we can see what we can do.