Pascal Bercher

Pascal Bercher is a tenured Associate Professor in the ANU College of Systems & Society, specializing in Artificial Intelligence Planning. He holds a Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence from Ulm University (2009–2017) and a Diplom (combined Bachelor/Master) in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg (2003–2009). His research focuses on hierarchical task network (HTN) planning and partial order causal link (POCL) planning, emphasizing computational complexity analysis and heuristic design.

• Academic Roles: Member of ANU’s SOCO Recognition Committee, WHS Committee, and incident investigator.
• Service: Mental first aider, reviewer for AAAI/ICAPS, and organizer of hierarchical planning workshops.

Research Interests: Bercher’s work addresses automated planning challenges, including domain modeling assistance, plan verification, and error correction. He leads the PANDA framework for hierarchical planning and contributed to the IPC 2023 HTN competition.

Key Awards: DECRA Fellowship (2024–2027), multiple best paper awards (ICAPS 2022/2021/2019), and outstanding reviewer recognitions (AAAI 2022/2021/2019).

Advising: Supervises six current PhD students and has mentored five previous students. His funded research explores modeling support for automated planning, aiming to reduce deployment costs and improve accessibility for industries.