David Speck
Postdoctoral Researcher
About Me
My primary research interest is in the field of artificial intelligence, with a focus on automated planning, i.e., the problem of finding a course of action that allows an intelligent agent to move from any situation it finds itself in to one that satisfies its goals.
Short bio
I completed my bachelor’s degree in 2015 and my master’s degree in 2018 in computer science at the University of Freiburg. From April 2018 to May 2022, I was a scientific employee at the University of Freiburg, Germany, at the Chair of Foundations of Artificial Intelligence of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Nebel and received my PhD in February 2022. From June 2022 to May 2024 I was part of the Machine Reasoning lab at Linköping University, Sweden.
Awards
- ICAPS 2024 Best Paper Award for the paper Decoupled Search for the Masses: A Novel Task Transformation for Classical Planning with Daniel Gnad at the 34th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024).
- ICAPS 2024 Best Dissertation Award for the doctoral thesis Symbolic Search for Optimal Planning with Expressive Extensions at the 34th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024).
- 4x First Place, 2x Second Place at the Second CoRe Challenge for the system PARIS 2023: Planning Algorithms for Reconfiguring Independent Sets with Remo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Michael Katz, Christian Muise, Florian Pommerening, Jendrik Seipp, and Silvan Sievers .
- Winner, Deterministic Optimal Track for the Ragnarok planner with Dominik Drexler, Daniel Gnad, Paul Höft, Jendrik Seipp, and Simon Ståhlberg at the 10th International Planning Competition (IPC 2023) at ICAPS 2023.
- Wolfgang-Gentner-Award for Young Researchers for outstanding scientific achievements in his dissertation awarded by the University of Freiburg.
- 4x First Place, 3x Second Place, 1x Third Place (in nine tracks) at the First CoRe Challenge for the system PARIS: Planning Algorithms for Reconfiguring Independent Sets with Remo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Michael Katz, Emil Keyder, Christian Muise, Alice Petrov, Florian Pommerening, Jendrik Seipp, and Silvan Sievers at the ICALP 2022 Workshop on Combinatorial Reconfiguration, Paris.
- ICAPS 2021 Best Student Paper Runner-Up Award for the paper On the Compilability and Expressive Power of State-Dependent Action Costs with David Borukhson, Robert Mattmüller, and Bernhard Nebel at the 31st International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2021).
- Winner, Discrete MDP Track for the planning system PROST-DD with Florian Geißer at the 6th International Probabilistic Planning Competition (IPPC 2018) at ICAPS 2018.
Publications
2024
David Speck, Jendrik Seipp and Álvaro Torralba.
Symbolic Search for Cost-Optimal Planning with Expressive Model Extensions.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research . 2024.
citationPaul Höft, David Speck, Florian Pommerening and Jendrik Seipp.
Versatile Cost Partitioning with Exact Sensitivity Analysis.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024), pp. 276–280. 2024.
paper slides poster code citationDavid Speck and Daniel Gnad.
Decoupled Search for the Masses: A Novel Task Transformation for Classical Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2024), pp. 546–554. 2024.
paper slides code citationDaniel Gnad and David Speck.
On an Attempt at Casting Orbit Search as a Task Transformation.
In ICAPS 2024 Workshop on Echoing (failed) Efforts in Planning (WEEP). 2024.
paper citation
2023
Remo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Michael Katz, Christian Muise, Alice Petrov, Florian Pommerening, Jendrik Seipp, Silvan Sievers and David Speck.
PARIS: Planning Algorithms for Reconfiguring Independent Sets.
In Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2023), pp. 453–460. 2023.
paper slides poster code citationPaul Höft, David Speck and Jendrik Seipp.
Sensitivity Analysis for Saturated Post-hoc Optimization in Classical Planning.
In Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2023), pp. 1044–1051. 2023.
paper slides poster code citationDominik Drexler, Daniel Gnad, Paul Höft, Jendrik Seipp, David Speck and Simon Ståhlberg.
Ragnarok.
In Tenth International Planning Competition (IPC-10): Planner Abstracts. 2023.
paper citationDominik Drexler, Jendrik Seipp and David Speck.
Odin: A Planner Based on Saturated Transition Cost Partitioning.
In Tenth International Planning Competition (IPC-10): Planner Abstracts. 2023.
paper citationPaul Höft, David Speck and Jendrik Seipp.
Dofri.
In Tenth International Planning Competition (IPC-10): Planner Abstracts. 2023.
paper citationDavid Speck.
SymK – A Versatile Symbolic Search Planner.
In Tenth International Planning Competition (IPC-10): Planner Abstracts. 2023.
paper citationDavid Speck, Paul Höft, Daniel Gnad and Jendrik Seipp.
Finding Matrix Multiplication Algorithms with Classical Planning — Extended Abstract.
In The 35th Annual Workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS). 2023.
paper slides poster code citation (Superseded by the ICAPS 2023 paper with the same name.)David Speck, Paul Höft, Daniel Gnad and Jendrik Seipp.
Finding Matrix Multiplication Algorithms with Classical Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2023), pp. 411–416. 2023.
paper slides poster code citationGregor Behnke, David Speck, Michael Katz and Shirin Sohrabi.
On Partial Satisfaction Planning with Total-Order HTNs.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2023), pp. 42–51. 2023.
paper code citation
2022
Kilian Hu and David Speck.
On Bidirectional Heuristic Search in Classical Planning: An Analysis of BAE*.
In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2022), pp. 91–99. 2022.
paper slides code citationRemo Christen, Salomé Eriksson, Michael Katz, Emil Keyder, Christian Muise, Alice Petrov, Florian Pommerening, Jendrik Seipp, Silvan Sievers and David Speck.
(PARIS) Planning Algorithms for Reconfiguring Independent Sets.
In First CoRe Challenge: Solver and Graph Descriptions, pp. 15–22. 2022.
paper citationDavid Speck and Jendrik Seipp.
New Refinement Strategies for Cartesian Abstractions.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2022), pp. 348–352. 2022.
paper slides recording poster code citationJulian von Tschammer, Robert Mattmüller and David Speck.
Loopless Top-K Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2022), pp. 380–384. 2022.
paper slides recording poster citationAndré Biedenkapp, David Speck, Silvan Sievers, Frank Hutter, Marius Lindauer and Jendrik Seipp.
Learning Domain-Independent Policies for Open List Selection.
In ICAPS 2022 Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL). 2022.
paper slides recording citationDavid Speck.
Symbolic Search for Optimal Planning with Expressive Extensions.
PhD thesis, University of Freiburg, 2022.
paper citation
2021
Dominik Drexler, Jendrik Seipp and David Speck.
Subset-Saturated Transition Cost Partitioning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2021), pp. 131–139. 2021.
paper slides poster code citationDavid Speck, André Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter, Robert Mattmüller and Marius Lindauer.
Learning Heuristic Selection with Dynamic Algorithm Configuration.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2021), pp. 597–605. 2021.
paper citationDavid Speck, David Borukhson, Robert Mattmüller and Bernhard Nebel.
On the Compilability and Expressive Power of State-Dependent Action Costs.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2021), pp. 358–366. 2021.
paper citationGregor Behnke and David Speck.
Symbolic Search for Optimal Total-Order HTN Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021), pp. 11744–11754. 2021.
paper citationDavid Speck and Michael Katz.
Symbolic Search for Oversubscription Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021), pp. 11972–11980. 2021.
paper citation
2020
David Speck, Florian Geißer and Robert Mattmüller.
When Perfect Is Not Good Enough: On the Search Behaviour of Symbolic Heuristic Search.
In Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2020), pp. 263–271. 2020.
paper citationDavid Speck, André Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter, Robert Mattmüller and Marius Lindauer.
Learning Heuristic Selection with Dynamic Algorithm Configuration.
In ICAPS 2020 Workshop on Bridging the Gap Between AI Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL), pp. 61–69. 2020.
paper citation (Superseded by the ICAPS 2021 paper with the same name.)Florian Geißer, David Speck and Thomas Keller.
Trial-Based Heuristic Tree Search for MDPs with Factored Action Spaces.
In Proceedings of the 13th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2020), pp. 38–47. 2020.
paper code citationDavid Speck, Robert Mattmüller and Bernhard Nebel.
Symbolic Top-k Planning.
In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020), pp. 9967–9974. 2020.
paper citation
2019
David Speck, Florian Geißer, Robert Mattmüller and Álvaro Torralba.
Symbolic Planning with Axioms.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2019), pp. 464–472. 2019.
paper citationFlorian Geißer, David Speck and Thomas Keller.
An Analysis of the Probabilistic Track of the IPC 2018.
In ICAPS 2019 Workshop on the International Planning Competition (WIPC), pp. 27–35. 2019.
paper code citationSumitra Corraya, Florian Geißer, David Speck and Robert Mattmüller.
An Empirical Study of the Usefulness of State-Dependent Action Costs in Planning.
In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2019), pp. 123–130. 2019.
paper citationOlga Speck, Rafael Horn, David Speck, Johannes Gantner and Philip Leistner.
Biomimetics meets Sustainability.
In Bionik: Patente aus der Natur. Tagungsbeiträge zum 9. Bionik-Kongress, pp. 81–91. 2019.
citation
2018
David Speck, Florian Geißer and Robert Mattmüller.
Symbolic Planning with Edge-Valued Multi-Valued Decision Diagrams.
In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2018), pp. 250–258. 2018.
paper citationFlorian Geißer and David Speck.
Prost-DD – Utilizing Symbolic Classical Planning in THTS.
In Sixth International Probabilistic Planning Competition (IPC-6): Planner Abstracts, pp. 13–16. 2018.
paper citationDavid Speck, Florian Geißer and Robert Mattmüller.
SYMPLE: Symbolic Planning based on EVMDDs.
In Ninth International Planning Competition (IPC-9): Planner Abstracts, pp. 91–94. 2018.
paper citation
2017
Olga Speck, David Speck, Rafael Horn, Johannes Gantner and Klaus Peter Sedlbauer.
Biomimetic bio-inspired biomorph sustainable? An attempt to classify and clarify biology-derived technical developments.
Bioinspiration and Biomimetics 12, pp. 011004. 2017.
citationDavid Speck, Christian Dornhege and Wolfram Burgard.
Shakey 2016 – How Much Does it Take to Redo Shakey the Robot?.
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2, pp. 1203–1209. 2017.
citation
2015
David Speck, Manuela Ortlieb and Robert Mattmüller.
Necessary Observations in Nondeterministic Planning.
In Proceedings of the 38th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2015), pp. 181–193. 2015.
paper citation