ANDREA MICHELI WINS ERC STARTING GRANT FOR FRONTIER RESEARCH IN AI and Temporal Planning

Head of the PSO (Planning, Scheduling and Optimization) Research Unit  at FBK’s Digital Industry Center , Andrea Micheli was the winner in the “Starting grant” category, reserved for talented scholars in the early stages of their careers.He will be able to count on a grant of about 1.5 million euros (exactly 1,493,750) to develop together with a team of researchers and doctoral students the STEP-RL project over five years, from January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2028.

Micheli outperformed the competition and convinced the jury by presenting his project in the area of Temporal Planning, one of the most strategic fields of Artificial Intelligence, with applications in autonomous robotics, logistics, flexible manufacturing and many other areas.

“Planning,” Andrea Micheli explained, “is the ability to create a strategy to achieve a desired goal and is one of the fundamental forms of intelligence. Temporal Planning studies the automated synthesis of strategies when time constraints are important.With my project we will study the basics of a new approach to temporal planning that is both domain-independent and efficient at the same time. The idea is to adopt techniques by which computer systems can continuously improve, becoming more efficient through self-adaptation. We want our algorithms to improve as new problems emerge, a bit like an apprentice learning from his or her own experience.”