Riccardo De Benedictis is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of CNR. The research interests of Riccardo are strongly influenced by the multidisciplinary context of its working environment. The group where he performs his research, has extensive experience in the development of automatic solvers used in planning and scheduling problems aimed at real-world applications. The implementation of these systems has had as a constant strong consideration for the human component that needs to interact with intelligent applications.
Planning and Scheduling with Complex Constraints. The specialization in Artificial Intelligence prior to graduation and subsequent collaboration with the PST group of the ISTC-CNR led Riccardo to a growing interest in issues related to automated planning with complex constraints. The poor performance of modern timeline-based planners, the rich expressiveness of their languages for the definition of the domains coupled with the ability to create flexible plans and therefore adaptable to (relatively) little unexpected issues at runtime, appear sufficient reasons for the development of a research line aimed at identifying new techniques for solving this kind of problems.
Interaction between Automated Planning and Cognitive Sciences. The highly stimulating work environment at the ISTC-CNR has feed interest in the cognitive sciences to Riccardo opening up the possibility of mediation between the purely engineering and technology while maintaining the need to consider human factors. From this mediation came out, on the one hand, new algorithms that increase in performance procedures for solving timeline-based problems, on the other, the possibility of using planning techniques to support the modeling of cognitive processes. The projects PANDORA, GiraffPlus, SpONSOR e La Città Educante, in particular, have offered the possibility of a first mediation through the implementation of user profiling techniques aimed at controlling the generation of plans whose purpose is to guide the user toward a new desired psychological profile.
