Andrea Micheli, researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation working within Spoke 2 (Integrative AI) of FAIR – Future AI Research, has won the ERC 2023 Starting Grant, a prestigious award dedicated to outstanding early-career researchers in Europe. Micheli has been awarded a €1.5 million grant to develop the STEP-RL project over the next five years, together with a team of researchers and PhD students.
Head of the PSO (Planning, Scheduling and Optimization) Research Unit at the FBK Center for Digital Industry, Micheli focuses on the development and technology transfer of decision-support algorithms. The STEP-RL project is set within the field of Temporal Planning, one of the most strategic areas of Artificial Intelligence, with applications in autonomous robotics, logistics, flexible manufacturing, and many other sectors.
“Planning is the ability to create a strategy to achieve a desired goal and is one of the fundamental forms of intelligence,” says Andrea Micheli. “Temporal Planning studies the automatic synthesis of strategies under significant temporal constraints. With STEP-RL, we will explore a new approach to temporal planning that is both domain-independent and efficient. Our idea is to use techniques that allow computational systems to continuously improve, enhancing their efficiency through self-adaptation. Our algorithms will gradually improve, adapting to emerging problems, much like an apprentice learns from daily experience.”
The ERC Starting Grant is an annual award that recognizes the excellence of young researchers and supports them in the early stages of their careers, enabling them to conduct independent research and build their own research teams.
This year, the ERC awarded 400 Starting Grants out of 2,696 proposals submitted by scientists across Europe, covering three main domains: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering, and Social Sciences & Humanities. The European Commission will invest a total of €628 million in these projects.