Daniel Gnad

I am lecturer at the Institute of Computer Science at Heidelberg University and assistant professor at Linköping University.

I did my studies in Computer Science at Saarland University. After finishing my MSc. degree, I stayed on as a PhD student in the group of Prof. Jörg Hoffmann. In 2022, I joined the Machine Reasoning Lab at Linköping University as a postdoctoral researcher, where I became assistant professor in 2023. In June 2025 I obtained my docent qualification (Swedish Habilitation) at Linköping University. Since May 2025 I am lecturer in Heidelberg and part-time in Linköping. In October 2025 I obtained my Habilitation in Computer Science at Heidelberg University.

My research interests are in the fields of artificial intelligence planning and model checking. More concretely, I am working on techniques that exploit the problem structure to find solutions more effectively. Methods I developed include compact state space representations like decoupled search and novel domain-independent heuristics for classical and numeric planning. Further more, I am interested in the computational complexity of planning formalisms, the grounding process that most planning systems perform as preprocessing, and in general combinations of symbolic planning algorithms and machine learning.

Recently, I started working on Explainable AI Planning, in particular in employing symbolic reasoning methods like SAT or ASP to analyze the solution space of planning problems.