U.S. officials have told airlines to "be prepared" for an expanded ban on carry-on electronic devices allowed on airplanes. Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan confirmed to reporters Tuesday that the administration is considering expanding the ban on laptops, which currently applies to U.S.-bound flights from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa. An expanded ban on devices larger than cellphones could potentially include "more than a couple" other regions, including flights from Western Europe. Lapan reminded reporters that DHS Secretary John Kelly has alluded to the ban "likely" being expanded. DHS officials, however, are still deciding where and how the new restrictions will be implemented.

We describe a constraint-based automated planner named Transition Constraints for Parallel Planning (TCPP). TCPP constructs its constraint model from a redefined version of the domain transition graphs (DTG) of a given planning problem. TCPP encodes state transitions in the redefined DTGs by using table constraints with cells containing don't cares or wild cards. TCPP uses Minion the constraint solver to solve the constraint model and returns a parallel plan. We empirically compare TCPP with the other state-of-the-art constraint-based parallel planner PaP2. PaP2 encodes action successions in the finite state automata (FSA) as table constraints with cells containing sets of values. PaP2 uses SICStus Prolog as its constraint solver. We also improve PaP2 by using dont cares and mutex constraints. Our experiments on a number of standard classical planning benchmark domains demonstrate TCPP's efficiency over the original PaP2 running on SICStus Prolog and our reconstructed and enhanced versions of PaP2 running on Minion.

Whether for research, purchasing, education or in conjuncation with a family vacation, going to and attending robotics-related conferences and trade shows can provide real personal and business benefits, particularly when the venue is in a foreign location.

FILE - In this Thursday, April 13, 2017, file photo, attorney Thomas Demetrio speaks at a news conference in Chicago. The woman who sobbed after an American Airlines flight attendant took her stroller now has a lawyer, Demetrio, who also represents the Kentucky doctor who was dragged from a United Express flight earlier in the month. American says the woman on the flight on April 21, was supposed to leave her doublewide stroller to be stored in the cargo bay, not take it into the cabin.

Here's a website than can answer that age-old question, "Where's a good place to go?" What it does: It's a no-frills online tool for getting travel inspiration. The front page has three simple settings: What months do you want to travel, how far away from home would you like to go, and are you looking for colder or warmer weather? Recommendations are sent in the form of travel photos from Instagram. What's hot: No need to ask friends for travel suggestions when someone else's travel photos will do just as well. The recommendations tap into the travels of Instagrammers (look for their handle in the top left corner of the photo).

The man dragged off a United Airlines flight in an incident that sparked an international uproar suffered a broken nose and concussion, his lawyer said, adding that he is planning to sue. David Dao has been released from the hospital, attorney Thomas Demetrio said at a news conference on Thursday during which a member of Dao's family spoke out for the first time. Dao's lawyers filed a petition in court requesting that the city, which operates O'Hare International Airport, and United Airlines preserve evidence related to the incident. They also said a lawsuit was forthcoming. "This lawsuit, among other things, hopefully, will create a not just national discussion, but international discussion, on how we're going to be treated going forward," Demetrio said.

Who among us hasn't had a moment of relief at the office wasting a few minutes of company time planning how best to spend that precious vacation? The numbers back it up, too--according to data from KAYAK, most people are using the travel planning site during office hours, with 57 percent of searches in the U.S. taking place from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the workweek. The site just launched a brand new under-the-radar page design to help wanderlusting office drones plan out their trips at work without risking the wrath of busybody bosses. KAYAK At Work looks just like an Excel doc--but it's actually a fully-functional trip planning page. The setup will let you search for flights and hotels directly on the spreadsheet layout, populating the grids with trip options just like it would a regular KAYAK search page.

Kayak has rolled out a new tool for those who like to make travel plans when they're supposed to be working. The popular search engine has designed a platform that looks like a spreadsheet instead of a travel search site. The tool, called @work, or At Work, features search criteria discretely placed in the rows and columns of a convincing spreadsheet titled "Travel Problem Solved Report." Whether or not this will fool the boss -- or get you fired -- remains to be seen. The company says in press materials that it's just trying to help workers out.

This is my 2nd publication in field of Artificial Intelligence, prepared as a part of my project in AI Nanodegree classes. This time the goal was to write research paper about important historical developments in the field of AI planning and search. I hope you will like it . Planning or more precisely: automated planning and scheduling is one of the major fields of AI (among the others like: Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and more). To accomplish given tasks, these systems need to have input data containing descriptions of initial states of the world, desired goals and actions.

The available tools and support for building planning and scheduling systems and applications have been steadily improving for decades. At the same time, the scope, scale, and complexity of the problems to be addressed has been increasing. In this column, I discuss several different scheduling applications developed over the past 25 years, and then describe the tools and techniques used in addressing these problems, showing how improved tools simplified (and in some cases enabled) the solution of problems of increasing difficulty.