Rate My Professor Charles Gretton

Charles Gretton is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the Australian National University (ANU) and Director of Attention and Innovation at the ANU Integrated AI Network. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from ANU in 2006, with a thesis on Artificial Intelligence and non-Markovian phenomena in decision-theoretic planning. Prior to his PhD, he was awarded the Dean's Prize from ANU's Department of Engineering and Information Technology in 2002. Gretton's career trajectory includes serving as a Researcher at NICTA's Brisbane laboratory from 2006 to 2008, Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the University of Birmingham, UK, from 2008 to 2011, and Senior Researcher at Data61 (formerly NICTA) from August 2011. In mid-2015, he co-founded HIVERY, a Data61 spinout company that develops data-driven retail solutions. He holds adjunct positions at Griffith University and has been lecturing at ANU since 2013, including courses on Artificial Intelligence (COMP3620, 2012 and 2013) and Theory of Computation (COMP3630, 2014).

Gretton's research focuses on automated planning, automated reasoning, and machine learning, applied to domains such as astronomy, security, astronomical instrumentation, mobile robot control, and continental-scale retail optimization. His key publications include 'Property Directed Reachability for Planning Revisited' (2023, with Ava Clifton), 'Image-to-image translation for wavefront and point spread function estimation' (2023, SPIE), 'Dagster: Parallel Structured Search' (2023), 'Dagster: Parallel Structured Search with Case Studies' (2022), 'Enhanced Adaptive Optics Control with Image to Image Translation' (2022, UAI), 'A TIL-Relaxed Heuristic for Planning with Time Windows' (2018, ICAPS), 'Symmetry Breaking via Descriptive Quotients' (2015, IJCAI), and 'HOL4 Verification of Descriptive Quotient' (2019, ITP). Early in his career, his AI algorithms secured gold and silver medals in international SAT and planning competitions. He was elected Fellow of Engineers Australia (FIEAust) on 25 October 2023. Gretton supervises PhD students, including current advisees Jeffrey Smith, Ava Clifton, Patrick Liston, and Xiaodi Zhang, and has mentored graduates such as Dr Mohammad AbdulAziz (2018) and Dr Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui (2015). Since 2018, he has convened the TechLauncher program, organizing industry-engaged projects, hackathons like the 2019 ANU Public Health hackfest in Singapore, and initiatives tied to New Colombo Plan scholarships. His research receives funding from Airbus, Oracle, TAPPC, and the Australian Federal Public Service. He contributes to ANU governance committees and emphasizes improving student experiences and academic freedom.