Giuseppe De Giacomo

About

Giuseppe De Giacomo is a leading figure in artificial intelligence, whose work bridges the gap between high-level reasoning and real-world robotic control. His research centers on the situation calculus, automated behavior composition, and the formal foundations of agent programming. De Giacomo fundamentally advanced the concept of execution monitoring, enabling robots to dynamically adapt their pre-planned programs to unpredictable exogenous events—a cornerstone for robust autonomous systems. His seminal 1998 paper on this topic has garnered over 100 citations. He also pioneered the formal synthesis of new, complex behaviors from libraries of simpler, partially controllable ones, a problem he addressed in highly cited works from 2007 and 2013. By developing languages like ConGolog for concurrent, prioritized execution, De Giacomo provided a powerful alternative to pure planning, allowing agents to execute complex, reactive programs. His work has been validated through implementations on cognitive mobile robots operating in real office environments, demonstrating a seamless integration of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) with physical action. With a career spanning over two decades, his contributions remain foundational for students and researchers working on autonomous agents, cognitive robotics, and the formal theory of action.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Execution Monitoring of High-Level Robot Programs.

   102 citations · 1998
2. 2
   Reasoning about concurrent execution, prioritized interrupts, and exogenous actions in the situation calculus

   81 citations · 1997
3. 3
   Automatic behavior composition synthesis

   68 citations · 2013
4. 4
   Automatic synthesis of new behaviors from a library of available behaviors

   43 citations · 2007
5. 5
   Planning with sensing for a mobile robot

   35 citations · 1997
6. 6
   Incremental execution of guarded theories

   30 citations · 2001
7. 7
   A theory and implementation of cognitive mobile robots

   26 citations · 1999
8. 8
   Moving a robot: the KR&R approach at work

   26 citations · 1996
9. 9
   Non-terminating processes in the situation calculus

   12 citations · 2019
10. 10
    Realizing multiple autonomous agents through scheduling of shared devices

    10 citations · 2008

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links