The International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) is an annual meeting of researchers and practitioners working in the area of Heuristic Search. This year marks the 13th edition of the conference and I am fortunate to be one of the chairs, together with my colleague Mauro Vallati.

SoCS 2020 will take place entirely online. Every talk and session will premiere as a live stream and will then be available for viewing on demand. The program includes:

• 27 technical talks in five streaming sessions.
• Two wonderful keynotes, from Rina Dechter and Peter Stuckey.
• For the first time ever an entire day of Master Class sessions, where recognised experts tell us about recent developments in Search.

Check out the the full schedule for links and how to participate. We have a community forum with dedicated threads for every talk. There is also a Discord server for live text/voice/video interaction.

Multi-agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fascinating problem that asks us to find a coordinated movement plan for a team of cooperating agents. It turns out that one of the major impediments to solving such problems efficiently is symmetry, which manifests when one or more agents have many equivalent paths, all of which are just permutations of one another and all of which are incompatible with the paths of other agents. In January 2019 I was awarded an Amazon Research Awards grant for a related project entitled Symmetry Breaking Constraints for Multi-agent Pathfinding.

In September 2019 I was invited by Amazon to give a talk about my progress at their annual Robotics Symposium.  It seems they made the recording of my talk available on Twitch. I share the video here as it might be of interest to others. In the video I give a very high level description of the MAPF problem and some intuitive explanations of the approaches I have worked on to solve this problem optimally. Here’s the bottom line: using something called “Barrier Constraints” my collaborators and I improve state of the art for Optimal MAPF by several orders of magnitude.

[Watch the video]   [Get the slides]

I recently attended AAMAS 2019, arguably the premier conference for new research on agent-based systems. My contribution to this conference comes in the form of an invited tutorial (on pathfinding), which I gave together with Nathan Sturtevant and Sven Koenig. In case you don’t know them, Nathan and Sven are two of the leading researchers in the area of Heuristic Search. Their papers and presentations are a highlight at any academic conference and I was fortunate to join them on this occasion.

The tutorial website is here. It features material from all presenters and a number of really nice interactive demos due to Nathan — including one on Jump Point Search. How cool is that?!

For convenience, I make my own slide deck available here (the sections were presented disjointly — they do not follow one another!).

I recently gave a talk at the AI Summit of the 2019 Game Developers Conference: New Ideas for Any-angle Pathfinding. The talk is an introduction to Any-angle Pathfinding and to the algorithms Anya and Polyanya, both of which guarantee to find optimal paths and often much faster than established techniques. Slides from my talk are available here