AI systems expertise celebrated at major international conference

The Australian National University (ANU) has been recognised for its expertise in computing and artificial intelligence (AI) at ICAPS 2026, the 36th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling.

Held in Dublin in June, ICAPS brings together leading researchers working in automated planning and scheduling, a field that underpins many modern AI systems.

Researchers from the ANU School of Computing received multiple top honours, highlighting the University’s international leadership in the field.

“ANU School of Computing is proud to see its research community so strongly represented at ICAPS 2026, the premier international AI conference on intelligent and automated planning and scheduling”, says Professor Antony Hosking, Director of the School of Computing.  

“With both Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards, a dissertation honourable mention, and a keynote invitation, this recognition reflects the depth of our work and the strength of our collaborative culture across students, alumni, and faculty.” 

Leading research recognised

A team comprising PhD student Kai (Oliver) Xi, Professor Stephen Gould and Professor Sylvie Thiebaux received the Best Paper Award, recognising exceptional research contributions with significant impact on the field.  

Xi was surprised and delighted by the recognition and hopes to continue this work.

“I hope to continue in academia as a researcher after completing my PhD, and this award is an incredibly encouraging start," he says.  

Their research explores how AI systems can learn from visual data to understand when actions are possible and how these actions change the world, helping it determine how to achieve goals in novel situations.

“Our neuro-symbolic approach learns high level models of the world and actions, which are suitable for long term planning, where many actions must be chained together to achieve a goal”, says Professor Thiebaux.  

If you send a robot into a new or unfamiliar place, it has to learn how things behave and predict what will happen, so it can figure out the right actions to complete its task.

“This is well-deserved recognition of the outstanding work by our PhD student Kai (Oliver) Xi, and the fruit of a very interesting collaboration across different areas of AI”, Thiebaux says. 

The Best Student Paper Award has been awarded to lead author Pascal Lauer, with contributions from Yifan Zhang, Associate Professor Patrik Haslum and Associate Professor Pascal Bercher.  

“This recognition highlights the importance of combining ideas from knowledge representation and automated planning, two research communities that have traditionally developed separately”, says Lauer.  

“Bringing these perspectives together can help us tackle more complex decision-making problems in the future.”

The award highlights the strength of emerging researchers within the ANU community and its collaborators.  

“I am very honoured to see this paper recognise,” says Lauer. “Our work shows that there is still room to improve how we represent planning problems to help AI systems make better decisions.”

These awards are among the highest distinctions presented at ICAPS and reflect both the originality and practical significance of the research.

Further recognition came through Songtuan Lin, who completed a PhD at ANU and is now based at Saarland University. Lin received one of only two Honourable Mentions for the Best Dissertation Award and credits the achievement in part to the support of his supervisor, Associate Professor Pascal Bercher.

"Our research addresses one major obstacle for using symbolic planning techniques to solve practical problems, which is the complexity of modelling the problem using the symbolic planning framework,” says Lin.

This recognition demonstrates the lasting international impact of ANU researchers and the strength of the University’s graduate research programs in computing.

Adding to this success, Associate Professor Pascal Bercher has been selected as one of three keynote speakers at ICAPS 2026.  

“I am honoured that I can promote hierarchical planning, an approach in which complex tasks get broken down into more primitive courses of action”, says Bercher.

Keynote speakers are invited in recognition of their influential contributions and leadership in the field, and Bercher’s appointment reflects the high regard for ANU affiliated research within the global AI community.  

Advancing AI for complex decision-making

Automated planning and scheduling is a foundational area of artificial intelligence, enabling systems to make complex decisions in domains such as robotics, logistics, and autonomous systems.  

“Planning is the engine behind many autonomous and assistive systems”, says Bercher.  

“Hierarchical planning often allows problems to be modelled more intuitively, as it mirrors the rule-like way human experts naturally break complex tasks down into smaller ones.”

The recognition of ANU computing researchers at ICAPS 2026 reinforces the University’s position as a leading centre for AI innovation, and highlights the importance of interdisciplinary, high-impact research in advancing intelligent systems.

With strong representation across awards, doctoral recognition and keynote leadership, the ANU School of Computing continues to help shape the future of AI planning research and its application to complex real-world challenges.