About the Authors

Malik Ghallab is Directeur de Recherche at the French National Center for Scientific Research. His main interests lie at the intersection of robotics and AI, in the robust integration of perception, action and reasoning capabilities within autonomous robots. He contributed to topics such as object recognition, scene interpretation, heuristics search, pattern matching and unification algorithms, knowledge compiling for real-time synchronous systems, temporal planning and supervision systems. His work on the latter topic has been focused on the development of the IxTeT system for planning and chronicle recognition. Malik Ghallab is head of the French national robotics program Robea, and director the LAAS-CNRS institute in Toulouse.

Dana Nau is a professor at the University of Maryland, and an AAAI Fellow. His research interests include AI planning and searching, and computer-integrated design and manufacturing. He holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Systems Research, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has more than 250 technical publications, and has co-authored computer programs that won the 1997 world championship of computer bridge and one of the top four awards in the 2002 International Planning Competition. Other awards he has received include an NSF graduate fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, an Outstanding Faculty award, and several "best paper" awards.

Paolo Traverso is Head of the SRA Division at ITC-IRST in Trento, Italy. The Division is active in the fields of automated planning, model checking, case based reasoning and machine learning, distributed systems, and agents. His main research interests include automated reasoning, planning under uncertainty, and the synthesis of controllers. He has contributed to research on mechanized meta-theories, formal verification, knowledge management, embedded systems, and logics for the integration of planning, acting, and sensing. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, a member of the Executive Council of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence.