Call for Nominations: ICAPS 2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award

[Ron Petrick]

Call for Nominations: ICAPS 2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award

Nomination deadline: February 20, 2026 UTC-12 (AoE)

The ICAPS Awards Committee is requesting nominations of candidate PhD dissertations for the ICAPS 2026 Outstanding Dissertation Award. This award honours an exceptional dissertation in any area of automated planning and scheduling research and will be presented during the ICAPS 2026 conference. PhD dissertations that were submitted or completed in 2024 or 2025 are eligible for the award. The recipient will receive a certificate and USD 1000.

The nomination material should include the following:

• a CV of the candidate with a complete list of publications,
• a copy of the dissertation or URL from which the dissertation can be accessed,
• a nomination letter by the PhD advisor (which must specify the submission/completion date of the dissertation), and
• two additional recommendation letters.

Please email all nominations, as a ZIP archive of PDF files, to the following email address: icaps2026-awa...@googlegroups.com

The two additional recommendation letters may be sent separately to the above address by the recommenders if desired, or can be included in the ZIP archive.

Please do not postpone asking recommenders for their letters until the last minute. This tends to leave them with little time to compose and send the letters. We urge nominators to request these letters as soon as possible, since the recommenders may need time to familiarize themselves with the contents of the dissertation. Nominators are responsible for ensuring that the letters of recommendation are submitted by the final deadline. The committee will not solicit missing letters, nor will it review incomplete nomination packets.

The dissertation should preferably be written in English. However, we accept dissertations not written in English if they are submitted together with the following documents that must be written in English: an extended abstract of the dissertation, a series of papers that cover the key results of the dissertation, and a document that describes the mapping from the papers to the chapters of the dissertation. Students who did not win an award last year can be nominated again if they are still eligible this year.

[Sent on behalf of the ICAPS Awards Committee]