Abstract: In academia, we often only see polished research papers, but do not hear how they came to be. This Doctoral Consortium talk will go behind the scenes and narrate how a number of research results came about and the challenges associated with their development. These will include past results in areas such as multi-player games, bidirectional search, suboptimal search, and current work in LLM planning. I will reflect on how research changes through different career stages, and encourage all attendees to be continual learners.

Bio: Nathan Sturtevant is a professor in the Computing Science department at the University of Alberta. His research focuses broadly on combinatorial search in single-agent, multi-agent, and adversarial settings. Nathan’s work on pathfinding had been deployed in the games industry in games such as Dragon Age: Origins and Nightingale. He is a AAAI Fellow, an Amii Fellow, and a Canada CIFAR AI chair. With his collaborators he has received conference best paper awards at AAAI, ICAPS, SoCS and AIIDE and the AIJ Prominent Paper Award in 2020 for his work on multi-agent pathfinding.