Maria Fox is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Informatics at King's College London. Previously she held a Professorship at the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, and before that she was a Reader in Computer Science at Durham University and a Lecturer in Computer Science at University College London. She is also an Adjunct Researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Instititute (MBARI), In Moss Landing, California. She co-founded (with Derek Long) the Planning Group, which is now part of the Planning, Agents and Intelligent Systems Group at King's College London. She is an elected counsellor on the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow and Chartered IT Professional of the British Computer Society.
Research and External Activities
My research is in AI Planning and Intelligent Autonomy. This includes planning domain modelling, domain modelling languages and their formal semantics, automatic domain analysis, planning for temporal and metric domains, continuous planning, plan validation and plan execution monitoring.
My work is in the temporal and metric extensions of the Planning Domain Description Language (PDDL2.1 and PDDL+) which I co-developed with Derek Long. PDDL2.1 is the international standard modelling language for temporal and numeric planning. I have also co-developed planners for temporal and numeric planning and planning with continuous functions of numeric variables (see my IJCAI-09 talk on Colin). Recently I have worked on applications of planning to policy-learning for control of real systems, including battery load management (with Dan Magazzeni and Derek Long, and AUV mission control with Dan, Derek, Kanna Rajan and Frederic Py.
Funded Projects
I have been Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on 10 EPSRC-funded research projects including 4 current projects held at King's:
- EP/J012211/1: Sustained Autonomy through Coupled Plan-based Control and World Modelling with Uncertainty
- EP/G023360/2: Automated Modelling and Reformulation in Planning
- EP/I031650/1: The Autonomic Power System
- EP/J012157/1: Automated Plan-Based Policy-Learning for Surveillance Problems
Committees and Boards
- Co-Chair (with Brian Williams): ICAPS Special Track on Continuous Planning, ICAPS 2012
- Editor-in-Chief of
- Member of the Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for the period 2010-2013.
- Program co-chair (with David Poole) of AAAI 2010.
- Associate Editor-in-Chief: AI Communications 2009-2011.
- Invited speaker: International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2009 .
- Associate Editor: Artificial Intelligence 2008-continuing.
- Co-Chair (with Mark Boddy and Sylvie Thiebaux) : International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2007.
- Advisory board member: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 2006-continuing.
- Editorial Board member: Artificial Intelligence 2006-2008.
- Associate Editor: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2003-2006.
- Member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) college since 2001.
Guest Edited Special Issues
- With David E. Smith, NASA-AMES): Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research: special track on 4th International Planning Competition, AAAI-Press 2005-2006.
- With Sylvie Thiebaux, Australian National University): Artificial Intelligence: special issue on Advances in Automated Planning, Elsevier 2009.
- With Rong Qu, University of Nottingham, and Derek Long, University of Strathclyde): Journal of Scheduling: special issue on Planning and Scheduling, Wiley 2008.
Employment History
- Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University College London, 1989-1995.
- Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Durham, 1995-2000.
- Reader in Computer Science, University of Durham, 2000-2003.
- CNRS fellow, Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systemes, 2003-2004
- Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, 2003-2011.
- Professor, Department of Informatics, King's College London, 2011-continuing.
Tel: +44 (0)20 7848 1579
Internal Ext: 1579
Office: Strand Building, S6.29
Email: maria.fox at kcl.ac.uk
Department of Informatics
King's College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS