Sandhya Subramanian presents her paper at ICAPS 2017, held at CMU
In past years, CSWomen has held lunch series, technical workshops, mentoring programs and provided travel grants to help women of CICS UMass Amherst, present themselves at various global fronts. Sandhya Subramanian has written a wonderful essay on her experiences at ICAPS this year, which we have reproduced in detail below.
In June 2017, I had the opportunity to present my paper at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) 2017. The paper titled “Optimizing Electric Vehicle Charging Through Determinization” was a joint work with Prof. Shlomo Zilberstein and Prof. Prashant Shenoy, and was based on my synthesis project. The conference was held in Carnegie Mellon University. Thanks to the support of CS Women travel grant, I was able to travel to Pittsburgh, PA to present my paper.
The conference, including the workshops, was a 5-day event and the attendees were a mix of students, professors, and researchers from the industry. It turned out to be a wonderful experience for me to meet my research community from around the world and share ideas. I was also able to attend several talks and workshop sessions that were part of the conference. It was interesting to hear from many different perspectives and I was able to learn a lot from the speakers at the sessions of workshop and the conference, and from conversations with the other attendees.
Almost everyday, there were panel discussions towards the end of the day. The topics for the panel discussion were very interesting and were centered around the various perspectives of future research directions in AI Planning. The panelists were a mix of renowned professors, sharing their views from different an academia perspective, and researchers from the industry, sharing their views from an industry perspective. Here’s a picture of the panel.
The coffee breaks were ideal for casual discussions among the attendees. My interaction with few professors and fellow PhD students during the coffee breaks helped me gain some valuable insights regarding future directions of my current research. Their feedback was very useful and their enthusiasm for my work increased my confidence!
Overall, the event was enjoyable and beneficial to me. I am thankful to Women for UMass Amherst and CSWomen group for providing their generous financial support. It helped cover some of the travel expenses to attend this wonderful event!