daniel-gnad.jpg

Room 2/203

Im Neuenheimer Feld 205

69120 Heidelberg

+49 6221 54 14365

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.

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 looking into Explainable AI Planning, in particular in employing symbolic reasoning methods like SAT or ASP to analyze the solution space of planning problems.

news

Jul 04, 2025 Our paper “AxSAT - Bringing Axioms to SAT Planning” got accepted at JELIA 2025.
May 01, 2025 I joined Heidelberg University as a lecturer (Akademischer Rat).