Big data is here: urban infrastructure systems are being instrumented to provide continuous reports on their performance; buildings are monitoring and reporting occupancy and energy use; distributed water and air quality sensors are providing real time information on dozens of environmental parameters. Cell phone location data is providing a detailed view of the activity patterns for millions o...

The Queensland Government recently released a statutory planning document South East Queensland Regional Plan 2005-2026 to manage the rapid growth of its south east region. One of the strategies identified in the document is to establish a number of transit-oriented developments (TODs) to create compact, walkable communities around high capacity public transport nodes. The objective of the pape...

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We introduced the concept of C-space entropy recently in [9] as a measure of knowledge of Cspace for sensor-based exploration and path planning for general robot-sensor systems. The robot plans the next sensing action to maximally reduce the expected C-space entropy, also called the Maximal expected Entropy Reduction, or MER criterion. The resulting view planning algorithms showed significant i...

The plans that planning systems generate for solvable planning tasks are routinely verified by independent validation tools. For unsolvable planning tasks, no such validation capabilities currently exist. We describe a family of certificates of unsolvability for classical planning tasks that can be efficiently verified and are sufficiently general for a wide range of planning approaches includi...

We introduce the level-ordered edge sequence (LOES), a succinct encoding for state-sets based on prefix-trees. For use in state-space search, we give algorithms for member testing and element hashing with runtime dependent only on state size, as well as time and memory efficient construction of and iteration over such sets. Finally we compare LOES to binary decision diagrams (BDDs) and explicit...

Effective Al sidekicks must solve the interlinked problems of understanding what their human collaborator's intentions are and planning actions to support them. This thesis explores a range of approximate but tractable approaches to planning for AI sidekicks based on decision-theoretic methods that reason about how the sidekick's actions will effect their beliefs about unobservable states of th...