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*News:*

- Early registration deadline on May 22.
- List of accepted papers available:
  http://socs13.search-conference.org/papers.html
- Invited speakers announced:
  http://socs13.search-conference.org/speakers.html


======================================================================
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION (SoCS 2013)
July 11-13, 2013
Leavenworth, WA, USA
======================================================================

SoCS 2013 web site: http://socs13.search-conference.org/

The organizing committee of SoCS 2013, the Sixth Annual Symposium on
Combinatorial Search, invites you to participate in the symposium,
which will take place in Leavenworth, WA, USA, from July 11-13. SoCS
2013 will be collocated with AAAI 2013 and SARA 2013.

SoCS 2013 is the sixth installment of the International Symposium on
Combinatorial Search. Heuristic search and other forms of
combinatorial search are currently very active areas of research in
artificial intelligence, planning, robotics, constraint programming,
operations research, bioinformatics, and other areas of computer
science. SoCS is meant to bring researchers from these areas together
to exchange their ideas and cross-fertilize the field.


SoCS 2013 Program
==================

SoCS 2013 will have a strong and varied program covering many
different facets of combinatorial search.

The list of accepted papers is available online at:

    http://socs13.search-conference.org/papers.html

We are very happy to announce that SoCS 2013 will have two
distinguished invited speakers, J. Christopher Beck and Gene
Cooperman. A description of the invited talks is available online at:

    http://socs13.search-conference.org/speakers.html


Special Scope This Year: Graph Search Engineering
==================================================

Previous SoCS events have provided a special focus on automated
planning (2010), search in robotics (2011), and grid-based path
planning (2012).

SoCS 2013 will have a special focus on graph search problems studied
in the algorithm engineering community. It will showcase several
papers on graph search problems that have originally been presented at
the Symposium of Experimental Algorithms (SEA) and Algorithm
Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX) meetings as well as previously
unpublished research originating from these communities.

We are very excited about the presentations in this special scope and
believe that SoCS 2013 will present wonderful opportunities to build
bridges between researchers in AI and experimental algorithmics.


Dates and Location
===================

SoCS will be collocated with AAAI 2013 and SARA 2013 and will take
place in Leavenworth, WA, USA. The symposium will start with an
opening reception on the evening of July 11 and will finish in the
late afternoon of July 13.

A free shuttle from Seattle-Tacoma airport to the symposium will be
provided on July 11. There will also be a free shuttle to the AAAI
conference at the end of the symposium.

The SARA symposium will be held at the same venue as SoCS, and a joint
program is planned for July 12 (the second day of technical sessions
for SARA and the first day of technical sessions for SoCS).


Important Dates
================

Early registration deadline: May 22, 2013
Late registration deadline: June 24, 2013
SoCS conference: July 11-13, 2013 (technical program: July 12-13)

SoCS web site: http://socs13.search-conference.org/


SoCS 2013 Chairs
=================

Conference chairs:
Malte Helmert, University of Basel, Switzerland
Gabriele Röger, University of Basel, Switzerland

Local arrangements:
Mausam, University of Washington, USA


SoCS 2013 Program Committee
============================

Christer Bäckström, Linköping University, Sweden
Roman Barták, Charles University, Czech Republic
Hannah Bast, University of Freiburg, Germany
Kostas Bekris, Rutgers University, USA
J. Benton, Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT)
Blai Bonet, Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela
Daniel Borrajo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Adi Botea, IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland
Ethan Burns, University of New Hampshire, USA
Rina Dechter, University of California, Irvine, USA
Daniel Delling, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, USA
Stefan Edelkamp, University of Bremen, Germany
Ariel Felner, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Alex Fukunaga, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Hector Geffner, ICREA & Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Carla Gomes, Cornell University, USA
Jörg Hoffmann, Saarland University, Germany
Robert Holte, University of Alberta, USA
Eric Huang, Palo Alto Research Center, USA
Frank Hutter, University of British Columbia, Canada
Riko Jacob, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Lydia Kavraki, Rice University, USA
Philip Kilby, NICTA and Australian National University, Australia
Akihiro Kishimoto, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Peter Kissmann, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany
Sven Koenig, University of Southern California, USA
Richard Korf, University of California at Los Angeles, USA
Carlos Linares López, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Robert Mattmüller, University of Freiburg, Germany
Martin Müller, University of Alberta, Canada
Héctor Palacios, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Wheeler Ruml, University of New Hampshire, USA
Lorenza Saitta, Universita del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Roni Stern, Ben-Gurion University, Israel
Nathan Sturtevant, University of Denver, USA
Jordan Thayer, Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT)
Jur van den Berg, University of Utah, USA
Toby Walsh, NICTA and UNSW, Australia
William Yeoh, New Mexico State University, USA
Rong Zhou, Palo Alto Research Center, USA