0.0. Aiplan - Introduction

0:06 Hello I'm Gerhard Wickler in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh 0:11 and together with my colleague Professor Austin Tate we present a free online course in AI Planning. 0:17 The aim of the course is to provide a basic grounding in artificial intelligence techniques for planning 0:22 with an overview of the wide spectrum of different problems and approaches 0:26 including their underlying theory and their applications. 0:31 Planning is an explicit deliberation process. 0:33 In this process, from all possible options 0:37 we choose those actions we need to perform 0:40 and we organize these actions into a structure called a plan. 0:44 We do so by anticipating the outcome of the actions. 0:47 AI planning is the computational study of this whole deliberation process. 0:52 Hello, I'm Austin Tate from the AI Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh 0:57 and on the course I'll describe the wide range of applications of AI planning. 1:01 Some we have been being involved in are... spacecraft mission planning, 1:05 large-scale machinery overhaul procedures, 1:08 search and rescue and emergency response, assembly and test procedures for rocket launchers, 1:13 planners for robots, 1:15 delivery truck sheduling and even help desk support. 1:18 AI planning technology has been embedded in games to control non-player characters and to provide an opponent in chess and bridge. 1:24 It can even be used in drug design, web services workflow, ecological disaster recovery 1:29 and a wide range of other areas. The course will provide an overview of these applications 1:34 and describe the practical planning techniques used in many of them. 1:38 AI planning comprises a five week course with about ten hours of lecture material. 1:43 You will first learn about the basic model that underlies virtually all planning. 1:47 Then we will show you how to formally represent planning problems 1:51 and with some theory 1:53 we will quickly get to the main part of this course 1:55 algorithms for solving planning problems. 1:58 These will be described in sufficient detail for you to go ahead and implement. 2:02 We look forward to seeing you on the course