Maria Fox
BAS Emeritus Fellow
Biography
Professor Maria Fox is a computer scientist and specialist in Automated Planning and Scheduling. Her particular research focus is on automating the strategic-level decision-making for actuated systems that operate in the physical environment. With Scott Hosking she co-leads the BAS AI Lab, bringing a combinatorial flavour of AI to the lab and broadening the range of AI applications that can be supported at BAS.
Before joining BAS, Maria was a senior scientist at Schlumberger Cambridge Research, developing automated planning and plan execution methods to improve consistency and reliability of onshore drilling operations. She holds a Royal Society Industry Fellowship working on automated campaign planning for the BAS fleet of underwater vehicles.
In her academic life, Maria held chairs in Computer Science, most recently at King’s College London and, before that, at the University of Strathclyde. During this period, she worked on fundamental methods and modelling languages for Automated Planning and developed some of the well-known reference planning systems for temporal planning. The methods that Maria has developed are fully generic and she has used them in a wide variety of applications, from planning power network management, battery loading and drilling operations, to planning search and track operations to find lost and evasive objects.
Key publications in Planning
Applications:
Michael Cashmore, Maria Fox, Derek Long, Daniele Magazzeni, Bram Ridder:
Opportunistic Planning in Autonomous Underwater Missions. IEEE Trans Autom. Sci. Eng. 15(2): 519-530 (2018)
Sara Bernardini, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
Combining temporal planning with probabilistic reasoning for autonomous surveillance missions. Auton. Robots 41(1): 181-203 (2017)
Chiara Piacentini, Varvara Alimisis, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
An extension of metric temporal planning with application to AC voltage control. Artif. Intell. 229: 210-245 (2015)
Sara Bernardini, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
Planning the Behaviour of Low-Cost Quadcopters for Surveillance Missions. ICAPS 2014
Daniele Magazzeni, Frédéric Py, Maria Fox, Derek Long, Kanna Rajan:
Policy learning for autonomous feature tracking. Auton. Robots 37(1): 47-69 (2014)
Maria Fox, Derek Long, Daniele Magazzeni:
Plan-based Policies for Efficient Multiple Battery Load Management. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 44: 335-382 (2012)
Planning methods and modelling:
Amanda Jane Coles, Andrew Coles, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
A Hybrid LP-RPG Heuristic for Modelling Numeric Resource Flows in Planning. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 46: 343-412 (2013)
Amanda Jane Coles, Andrew Coles, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
COLIN: Planning with Continuous Linear Numeric Change. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 44: 1-96 (2012)
Amanda Jane Coles, Andrew Coles, Maria Fox, Derek Long:
Forward-Chaining Partial-Order Planning. ICAPS 2010: 42-49
Maria Fox, Derek Long:
Modelling Mixed Discrete-Continuous Domains for Planning. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 27: 235-297 (2006)
Maria Fox, Derek Long:
PDDL2.1: An Extension to PDDL for Expressing Temporal Planning Domains. J. Artif. Intell. Res. 20: 61-124 (2003)
Previous Career:
1989: PhD in Computer Science: Abstraction methods for Planning
1989-1996: Lecturer in Computer Science, University College London
1996-2003: Lecturer (then Reader) in Computer Science, University of Durham
2003-2011: Professor in Computer Science (AI Planning), University of Strathclyde
2011-2016: Professor in Computer Science (AI Planning), King’s College London
2016-2021: Senior Scientist, Schlumberger Cambridge Research
Research interests
My research specialises in automated planning, scheduling and optimisation, and their application to real world cyber systems and robotics.
Collaborations
Planning and Autonomy Group, Schlumberger Cambridge Research
Publications from NERC Open Research Archive
2024
Rogers, Martin S.J. ORCID record for Martin S.J. Rogers, Fox, Maria ORCID record for Maria Fox, Fleming, Andrew ORCID record for Andrew Fleming, van Zeeland, Louisa, Wilkinson, Jeremy, Hosking, J. Scott ORCID record for J. Scott Hosking. (2024) Sea ice detection using concurrent multispectral and synthetic aperture radar imagery. Remote Sensing of Environment, 305 (). 14 pp. 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114073
2022
Bajada, J., Fox, M. ORCID record for M. Fox, Long, D.. (2022) Efficient Temporal Piecewise-Linear Numeric Planning with Lazy Consistency Checking. IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 3 (). 12 pp. 10.1109/TAI.2022.3146797
- Digital Twins of the Polar Regions
- AMOP – Autonomous Marine Operations Planning
- AMOP – Autonomous Marine Operations Planning
Royal Society Industry Fellowship: Command and Control for Oceanographic Survey
2022
AI tool to revolutionise polar ship navigation
News 15 November, 2022