Leader, Optimisation Research Group
Canberra Research Laboratory

I am the director of NICTA's Canberra Lab and a professor at the Australian National  University. I received a PhD in computer science from the university of Rennes in 1995 and held continuing research appointments with  INRIA and CSIRO before joining the ANU in 2001. I have been associated with NICTA since its beginning.

My research interests are in artificial intelligence, in particular automated planning, diagnosis, search, and reasoning under uncertainty. My current research focuses on developing planning and diagnosis techniques that can handle larger and more complex problems featuring uncertainty, time, and coordination among multiple entities. I have been investigating applications of these techniques in autonomous robotics, intelligent transport, and power distribution.

Recent projects I contributed to include DPOLP (Dynamic Planning, Optimisation and Learning Project), which made a number of significant contributions to building tools for planning with time and uncertainty with military operations planning as the target application. I led NICTA's  SuperCom project (model-based Supervision of Composite systems), which developed powerful methods for monitoring and diagnosing distributed dynamic systems such as those found in power distribution. I am currently a chief investigator on an ARC funded project that aims at detecting and exploiting structure in automated planning problems.

Current professional activities include being an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the president elect of the board of directors of ICAPS, the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. I was a co-chair of ICAPS in 2007, and the workshops chair of the 2009 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

For more information and access to my publications, visit my ANU webpage.