Stephan Schiffel Dr. rer. nat. Þinghólsbraut 54 200 Kópavogur, Iceland +354 6952998 stephans@ru.is Research Interests game playing, in particular general game playing heuristic and simulation-based search methods knowledge representation and reasoning about actions applications of game playing techniques Experience 2015 Assistant Professor, Reykjavík University, Reykjavík, Iceland. Research in general game playing, Teaching in Computer Science. 2011 2015 Post-Doc Researcher, Reykjavík University, Reykjavík, Iceland. Research in general game playing, Teaching in Computer Science. 2005 2011 Post Graduate Researcher, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany. Research in the areas of reasoning about actions (see http://fluxagent.org/) and General Game Playing (see http://www.general-game-playing.de/). Development of Fluxplayer, a general game playing program that participated in international competitions since 2005 and won the 2006 world championship. Mentoring of several research assistants in General Game Playing. System administration of the computer network (10-15 Linux machines) at the Computational Logic group at TU-Dresden. 2003 2005 Student assistant, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany. Collaboration in the ALAN research project, which developed Flux, an axiomatization language for autonomous agents and applied it to a robot. 2000 2003 Part-time developer, Infineon Technologies, Dresden, Germany. Development of data extraction and analysis tools. Teaching 2015 Introduction to Machine Learning (T-504-ITML), Reykjavík University. for bachelor students 2014 Computer Networks (T-409-TSAM), Reykjavík University. for bachelor students 1/6
2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Artificial Intelligence (T-622-ARTI), Reykjavík University. for bachelor students 2011, 2013 General Game Playing (T-732-GAPL), Reykjavík University. for master students 2012 Advisor for master thesis, Reykjavík University. Andrea Monacchi, An early warning system for ambient assisted living 2005 2011 General Game Playing, TU-Dresden. teaching assistant for the annual course in the master program 2005 2011 Advisor for 10 student projects, diploma and master theses, TU-Dresden. 2003 Software technology lab, TU-Dresden. mentor for 3 teams of students for a one semester lab Education 2011 Workshop project management, Rannis, Reykjavík. 1-day workshop How to manage the finances of your FP7 project successfully 2005 2011 PhD in Computer Science, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany. summa cum laude (with distinction) 2000 2005 Diploma in Computer Science, TU-Dresden, Dresden, Germany. grade: 1.1, corresponds to ECTS A (A german diploma is equivalent to a master.) Doctoral Thesis title advisor description Knowledge-Based General Game Playing Prof. Dr. Michael Thielscher The thesis presents a program that is able to play an arbitrary game by being given only the rules of the game. The main contributions are methods for the automatic construction of heuristic evaluation functions, the automated discovery of game structures, a system for proving properties of games, and symmetry detection and exploitation for general games. Diploma Thesis (equivalent to a master thesis) title Translation of Domain Specifications between Situation Calculus and Fluent Calculus advisor description Prof. Dr. Michael Thielscher The thesis investigates the relation between the two action calculi, Situation Calculus and Fluent Calculus, and their respective implementations Golog and Flux. 2/6
Awards 2012 SAP dissertation award 2006 Winner of the General Game Playing World Championship. Fundraising 2015-2018 Icelandic Technology Development Fund: Partner in the project Novel expert system for assessing the need for Rheumatologic consultation with Expeda ehf. 2014-2015 Isavia: Co-author of the proposal and supervisor of master student on the project Optimization of Aircraft Tracker Parameters. 2013-2016 Rannis START grant: Author of the proposal and PI of the project Combining Heuristic Search and Monte-Carlo Methods in General Game Playing. 2007-2011 DFG (German Research Foundation): Co-author of the proposal for the project General Game Playing and successful completion of this project as PI. Chair/Co- Chair PC-Member Reviewer Web service Services I have been a Co-Chair of the IJCAI workshop on General Intelligence in Game Playing (2015) I have been a PC Member of the following conferences and workshops in Artificial Intelligence: IJCAI (2009, 2011, 2015), AAAI (2010, 2016), ECAI (2010, 2014), KR (2014), GIGA (2013), KI (2014, 2015) I have been a reviewer on conferences and journals in Artificial Intelligence: TOPLAS (2013), AAAI (2007, 2012), TCIAIG (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), KR (2009), GIGA (2009), Common Sense (2009), ESSLLI (2008), ECAI (2008), KI (2007), ECAI CGW (2014), AI (2014) I am the maintainer of the GGP Server project and web server (see http://ggpserver.sf.net/) that is used by students and researchers world wide to test and evaluate their general game players. Languages German English Icelandic French Native Very good Conversational Basic 3/6
Publications Peter Gregory, Yngvi Björnsson, and Stephan Schiffel. The grl system: Learning board game rules with piece-move interactions. In The IJCAI-15 Workshop on General Game Playing, pages 55 62, 2015. Kristinn R Thórisson, Jordi Bieger, Stephan Schiffel, and Deon Garrett. Towards flexible task environments for comprehensive evaluation of artificial intelligent systems and automatic learners. In Artificial General Intelligence: 8th International Conference, AGI 2015, Berlin, Germany, July 22-25, 2015, Proceedings, volume 9205, pages 187 196. 2015. Michal Trutman and Stephan Schiffel. Creating action heuristics for general game playing agents. In The IJCAI-15 Workshop on General Game Playing, pages 39 46, 2015. Stephan Schiffel and Yngvi Björnsson. Efficiency of GDL reasoners. Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, IEEE Transactions on, 6(4):343 354, 2014. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Representing and reasoning about the rules of general games with imperfect information. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 49:171 206, 2014. Yngvi Björnsson and Stephan Schiffel. Comparison of GDL reasoners. In Yngvi Björnsson and Michael Thielscher, editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI-13 Workshop on General Game Playing (GIGA 13), Beijing, China, August 2013. Daniel Michulke and Stephan Schiffel. Admissible distance heuristics for general games. In Joaquim Filipe and Ana Fred, editors, Agents and Artificial Intelligence, volume 358 of Communications in Computer and Information Science, pages 188 203. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2013. Sebastian Haufe, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher. Automated verification of state sequence invariants in general game playing. Artificial Intelligence, 187-188:1 30, August 2012. Daniel Michulke and Stephan Schiffel. Distance features for general game playing agents. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Vilamoura, Portugal, February 2012. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Reasoning about general games described in GDL-II. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco, August 2011. AAAI Press. Daniel Michulke and Stephan Schiffel. Distance features for general game playing. In Yngvi Björnsson, Nathan Sturtevant, and 4/6
Michael Thielscher, editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI-11 Workshop on General Game Playing (GIGA 11), Barcelona, Spain, July 2011. Stephan Schiffel. Knowledge-Based General Game Playing. PhD thesis, Technische Universität Dresden, July 2011. Sebastian Haufe, Daniel Michulke, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher. Knowledge-based general game playing. KI, 25(1):25 33, 2011. Stephan Schiffel. Symmetry detection in general game playing. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 980 985, Atlanta, July 2010. AAAI Press. Dengji Zhao, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher. Decomposition of multi-player games. In A. Nicholson and X. Li, editors, Proceedings of the Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 5866 of LNCS, pages 475 484, Melbourne, December 2009. Springer. Martin Günther, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher. Factoring general games. In Yngvi Björnsson, Peter Stone, and Michael Thielscher, editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI-09 Workshop on General Game Playing (GIGA 09), pages 27 34, Pasadena, California, USA, July 2009. Stephan Schiffel. Symmetry detection in general game playing. In Yngvi Björnsson, Peter Stone, and Michael Thielscher, editors, Proceedings of the IJCAI-09 Workshop on General Game Playing (GIGA 09), pages 67 74, Pasadena, California, USA, July 2009. Daniel Michulke and Stephan Schiffel. Matt bei "vier gewinnt" (Mate in Connect-4). c t, 1:174 181, January 2009. Conrad Drescher, Stephan Schiffel, and Michael Thielscher. A declarative agent programming language based on action theories. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Frontiers of Combining Systems (FroCoS), LNCS, Trento, Italy, 2009. Springer. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Automated theorem proving for general game playing. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2009. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. A multiagent semantics for the game description language. In J. Filipe, A. Fred, and B. Sharp, editors, International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Porto, 2009. Springer. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Specifying multiagent environments in the game description language. In Joaquim Filipe, Ana Fred, and Bernadette Sharp, editors, Proceedings 5/6
of ICAART 2009 - First International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence. INSTICC (Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication), INSTICC Press, 2009. Stephan Schiffel, Michael Thielscher, and Doan Thu Trang. An agent team based on FLUX for the ProMAS Contest 2007. In Programming Multi-Agent Systems, volume 4908 of LNAI, pages 261 265. Springer, 2008. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Automatic construction of a heuristic search function for general game playing. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change at IJCAI, Hyderabad, India, January 2007. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Fluxplayer: A successful general game player. In Proceedings of the 22nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07), pages 1191 1196, Vancouver, 2007. AAAI Press. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Reconciling situation calculus and fluent calculus. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages 287 292, Boston, MA, July 2006. AAAI Press. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Multi-agent FLUX for the gold mining domain (system description). In Computational Logic for Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA), volume 4371 of LNAI, pages 294 303, Hakodate, Japan, 2006. Springer. Stephan Schiffel and Michael Thielscher. Interpreting Golog programs in Flux. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning, pages 193 198, Corfu, Greece, May 2005. 6/6