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Hello I'm Gerhard Wickler in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh 


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and together with my colleague Professor Austin Tate we present


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a free online course in AI Planning.


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The aim of the course is to provide a basic grounding in


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artificial intelligence techniques for planning


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with an overview of the wide spectrum of different problems and approaches


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including their underlying theory and their applications.


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Planning is an explicit deliberation process.


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In this process, from all possible options


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we choose those actions we need to perform


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and we organize these actions into a structure called a plan.


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We do so by anticipating the outcome of the actions.


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AI planning is the computational study of this whole deliberation process.


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Hello, I'm Austin Tate from the AI Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh


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and on the course I'll describe the wide range of applications of AI planning.


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Some we have been being involved in are... spacecraft mission planning,


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large-scale machinery overhaul procedures,


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search and rescue and emergency response, assembly and test procedures for rocket launchers,


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planners for robots,


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delivery truck sheduling and even help desk support.


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AI planning technology has been embedded in games to control non-player characters


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and to provide an opponent in chess and bridge.


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It can even be used in drug design, web services workflow, ecological disaster recovery


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and a wide range of other areas.


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The course will provide an overview of these applications 


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and describe the practical planning techniques used in many of them.


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AI planning comprises a five week course with about ten hours of lecture material.


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You will first learn about the basic model that underlies virtually all planning.


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Then we will show you how to formally represent planning problems


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and with some theory


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we will quickly get to the main part of this course


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algorithms for solving planning problems.


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These will be described in sufficient detail for you to go ahead and implement.


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We look forward to seeing you on the course.