Adjunct Research Professor of Computer Science
Education
- Doctoral Degree, Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University
- Master's Degree, Business Administration, University of Hamburg
- Master's Degree, Computer Science, University of Hamburg
- Master's Degree, Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University
Biography
Sven Koenig is Chancellor's Professor and Bren Chair at the University of California, Irvine and was also a program director at the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2010 to 2012. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 for his dissertation on "Goal-Directed Acting with Incomplete Information." He also holds M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is proud of his students, who have won many awards (including best paper, best dissertation, best research assistant, and best teaching assistant awards) and took their first jobs in academia. For example, one of them (Prof. William Yeoh) was selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the "AI's 10 to Watch" 2015 ("10 young stars in the field of AI," chosen every two years from researchers around the world), another one of them (Prof. Hang Ma) received the ICAPS Best Dissertation Award 2021, and a third one accepted a tenure-track position at Carnegie Mellon University.
Sven has edited several conference proceedings and published more than 280 papers in various areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, including more than 50 papers at AAAI and IJCAI (the two main artificial intelligence conferences), as well as papers in planning (ICAPS and its predecessors AIPS and ECP), agents (AAMAS and its predecessor Autonomous Agents), machine learning (ICML, COLT), numerical artificial intelligence and control (NIPS, UAI, AI and Mathematics), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR, CP, CPAIOR), robotics (ICRA, IROS, RSS), games (AIIDE, FDG, CIG), and others. He was conference co-chair of the 2002 Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA), the 2004 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), the 2009 International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), the 2018 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), and the 2022 International Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research (CPAIOR). He was program co-chair of the 2005 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the 2015 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the 2016 and 2017 Symposia on Educational Advances in AI (EAAI), and the 2018 and 2023 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. He is an elected member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). He is past chair of the AAAI conference committee, past president of SoCS, and past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM SIGAI). He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and an editor of the Communications of the ACM (Research Highlights). He was a councilor of AAAI, an elected member-at-large of the steering group of the AAAS Information, Computing, and Communication section, a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the Computing Research Association (CRA), a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and AI Magazine (where he earlier helped to start both the "Competition Report" and the "AI in Industry" tracks), an associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal, Computational Intelligence, Advances in Complex Systems and JAIR, and a member of the steering committees of ICAPS, SoCS, and SARA.
Additional information about Sven can be found on his webpages: idm-lab.org.
Please reach Sven at sven.koenig@uci.edu.
Research Summary
Sven is interested in intelligent systems that operate in large, nondeterministic, nonstationary or only partially known domains. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environments, imperfect abilities to manipulate them, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. He believes that finding good solutions to these problems requires approaches that cut across many different fields and, consequently, his research draws on areas such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and operations research. Applications of his research include robotics, logistics, and video games.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, including Agents, Decision Making, Games, \Markov Decision Processes, Mobile Robotics, Multi-Agent Systems, Multi-Robot Coordination, Navigation, Planning, and Search.
Awards
- 2024 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) Best System Demonstration Honorable Mention
- 2023 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Classic Paper (= "Test of Time") Award
- 2023 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS): Best Student Paper Honorable Mention
- 2022 University of Southern California: Dean's Professor of Computer Science
- 2022 Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS): Best Student Paper Award
- 2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): Fellow
- 2021 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS): Best System Demonstration Award (Gold)
- 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Fellow
- 2020 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS): Outstanding Student Paper Award
- 2020 Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS): Best Paper Honorable Mention
- 2020 NeurIPS Flatland Competition (a railway scheduling competition): Winning Team (Advisor)
- 2019 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Classic Paper (= "Test of Time") Honorable Mention
- 2019 USC Stevens Center for Innovation: Technology Commercialization Award
- 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): Fellow
- 2017 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award
- 2017 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Outstanding Senior Program Committee Member
- 2016 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS): Outstanding Paper Award (Robotics Track)
- 2015 University of Southern California (USC): Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching and Education
- 2013 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): Fellow
- 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF): Director's Award for Collaborative Integration
- 2011 National Science Foundation (NSF): Director's Award for Collaborative Integration
- 2009 University of Southern California (USC): Mellon Mentoring Award: Faculty Mentoring Undergraduate Students
- 2009 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS): Nomination for the Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award
- 2004 Georgia Institute of Technology: SAIC Student Advisement Award
- 2003 Georgia Institute of Technology: Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award
- 2001 International Business Machines (IBM): Faculty Partnership Award
- 2000 National Science Foundation (NSF): Career Award
- 1999 Georgia Institute of Technology: Raytheon Faculty Research Award
