Son Thanh To, PhD.

New Mexico State University

Department of Computer Science

Address: 2511 Cole Village, Las Cruces, NM 88001

Home Phone: 575-645-9625

Cell Phone:  575-202-8854

Email: sto@cs.nmsu.edu

TA Courses:

·         CS570: Analysis of Algorithm (Spring 2008): Office Hours: Mondays 11:30AM – 1:30PM

·         CS570: Analysis of Algorithm (Fall 2007)

·         CS491: Parallel Programming (Spring 2007)

Research Interests:

·         Knowledge Representation

·         Reasoning about Action and Changes

·         Planning, Planning under Uncertainty: Conformant Planning, Contingent Planning

·         Parallel Computing Solutions to Planning

Publications:

·         Son Thanh To, Tran Cao Son, and Enrico Pontelli. On Belief State Representation and Its Application in Conformant Planning. Submitted to Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), December, 2012 (PDF, systems and benchmarks)

·         Son Thanh To. A New Approach to Contingent Planning Using a Disjunctive Representation in AND/OR forward Search with Novel Pruning Techniques. Submitted to Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), December, 2012 (PDF, DNFct planner, benchmarks)

·         Son Thanh To, Tran Cao Son, and Enrico Pontelli. Conjunctive Representations in Contingent Planning: Prime Implicates vs. Minimal CNF Formula. To appear in Proc. of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2011 (PDF)

·         Son Thanh To, Enrico Pontelli, and Tran Cao Son. On the Effectiveness of CNF and DNF Representations in Contingent Planning. To appear in Proc. of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2011 (PDF)

·         Son Thanh To, Tran Cao Son, and Enrico Pontelli. Contingent Planning as And/Or forward Search with Disjunctive Representation. To appear in Proc. of the 21th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), 2011 (PDF). I’m sorry that I haven’t posted the full version with proofs and more detailed algorithm. It is under working. Thank you so much for your interest.

·         Son Thanh To, Tran Cao Son, and Enrico Pontelli. On the Use of Prime Implicates in Conformant Planning.  In Proc. of AAAI-2010  (PDF)

·         Son Thanh To, Tran Cao Son, and Enrico Pontelli. A New Approach to Conformant Planning using CNF.  In Proc. of ICAPS-2010 (PDF)

·         Son Thanh To, Enrico Pontelli, and Tran Cao Son. A Conformant Planner with Explicit Disjunctive Representation of Belief States.  In Proc. of ICAPS-2009 (PDF)

·         Phan Huy Tu, Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son, and To Thanh Son. Applications of Parallel Processing Technologies in Heuristic Search Planning: Methodologies and Experiments. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience 2009 (PDF)

·         Tran Cao Son, Enrico Pontelli, and To Thanh Son. Some Results on the Completeness of Approximation Based Reasoning. 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

·         To Thanh Son, Phan Huy Tu, Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son. Executing Action Languages for Planning Problems on Multi-core Platforms: Some Preliminary Results. DAMP 2008: 47-61

Planning Systems (Including C++ Source Code) and Benchmarks:

I am going to write the passer for the planners in C++ that can read the PDDL directly without using the translator in Prolog. This translator currently contains some bugs and it is very difficult to incorporate several techniques such as on-off relaxation (ICAPS-2010), forward chaining, etc… Hopefully this work can be done soon. Following are the versions that still need the aforementioned translator. There are several domains for which the translator does not provide a correct output. For those problems, a correct input theory in AL format is given in the benchmark package.

·         DNF: a conformant planning system using minimal DNF formula to represent belief states and the benchmarks in the action language (AL) format (download)

·         DNFct: a contingent planning system using PrAO, an And/Or forward search algorithm with a novel pruning technique, and minimal DNF representation (download)

·         CNFct: a contingent planning system using minimal CNF representation and PrAO (download)

·         PIct: a contingent planning system using minimal CNF representation and PrAO (download)

·         Contingent Benchmarks for DNFct, CNFct, and PIct: (download)

Technical Reports:

·         Son Thanh To, Phan Huy Tu, Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son. Parallel Processing in Conformant Planning: Methodologies and Experiments. Technical Report NMSU-CS-TR-2007-005, New Mexico State University

Awards:

·         Best Student Research in the Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, 2012

·         Merit-based Enhancement Fellowship by New Mexico State University for academic year 2011-2012

·         Best Student Research in the Department of Computer Science, New Mexico State University, 2010

·         GAANN Fellowship: 2005 - 2007