Erez Karpas will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the Model-based Embedded and Robotic Systems lab at MIT in October 2013.
He is currently a research fellow at the Technion-Microsoft Electronic-Commerce Research Center. Erez received his Ph.D. in Information Systems Engineering from the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Carmel Domshlak and Prof. Shaul Markovitch. Prior to that, he received his M.Sc. in Computer Science in 2005, and his B.Sc. in Math and Computer Science, both from Ben-Gurion University. Erez is married to Dikla Segel Karpas, and they raise their two cats together.
Erez’s main research interest is decision making in autonomous systems, where he has worked in the field of automated domain-independent planning. In domain-independent planning, an agent must find a sequence of actions leading from the current world state to a desired world state, given a symbolic description (that is, a model) of the world, with no prior domain knowledge. Erez has applied heuristic forward search methods to automated planning, where he focused on using non-classical heuristic, which exploit knowledge that is gathered during search.
He is a member of the Fast Downward automated planner development team, with whom he has won several awards at the 2011 International Plannning Competition.