Symposium on Combinatorial Search - 2015

该基金将为美国研究生和本科生参加第八届组合搜索研讨会（SoCS）提供部分支持，该科学会议将于2015年6月11日至15日在以色列死海举行。会议的主要领域是计算机科学。组合搜索是计算机科学的一个领域，它处理对一个问题的大量可选解决方案进行系统的试错探索。例如，一辆运送包裹的卡车需要访问所有必须运送包裹的地址，然后返回到它的基地，最好是通过最短的路线。NSF的资助对于支持那些无法参加研讨会的学生至关重要。参加这样的会议并展示他们的研究是学生专业发展的重要组成部分，解决了美国社会科学院高技能计算机科学家的严重短缺问题，汇集了来自人工智能、规划、机器人、约束编程、运筹学、生物信息学和计算机游戏等各个领域的启发式搜索和组合优化研究人员。这项活动的智力价值源于一次将来自计算机科学不同领域的研究人员聚集在一起，这些研究人员既推进了启发式搜索和/或组合优化的最新技术，又在他们的研究中使用了这些工具。更广泛的影响来自推动和/或使用这些工具的不同领域的交叉施肥，通过提供关于这些主题的小型亲密会议、介绍这些工作的论坛和出版该领域工作的档案程序来促进该领域的研究。后一个目标有助于培养这一领域的新研究人员。

This grant is to provide partial support for U.S.-based graduate and undergraduate students to attend the Eighth Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), a scientific conference to be held at the Dead Sea in Israel from June 11-15, 2015. The general field of the meeting is computer science. Combinatorial search is an area of computer science that deals with systematic trial-and-error exploration of a very large number of alternative solutions to a problem. For example, a package delivery truck needs to visit all the addresses to which packages must be delivered, and return to its home base, ideally via the shortest possible route. NSF funding is crucial to support students who would otherwise not be able to attend the symposium. Attending such meetings and presenting their research is an important part of the professional development of students, addressing a critical shortage of highly-skilled computer scientists in the U.S.SoCS brings together researchers in heuristic search and combinatorial optimization from all areas of artificial intelligence, planning, robotics, constraint programming, operations research, bioinformatics, and computer games. The intellectual merit of this activity stems from bringing together in one place at one time researchers from otherwise diverse areas of computer science that both advance the state of the art in heuristic search and/or combinatorial optimization, and also use these tools in their research. The broader impacts come from cross-fertilization of different fields that advance and/or use these tools, by promoting research in this area by providing a small intimate meeting on these topics, a forum for presenting such work, and archival proceedings for publishing work in this area. These latter goals are instrumental to training new researchers in this area.