AI MAGAZINE AAAI News
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AAAI News Congratulations to the 2011 AAAI Award Winners! Henry Kautz, AAAI President, and Eric AAAI News Horvitz, AAAI Past President and Awards Committee Chair, presented the AAAI Awards in August at AAAI-11 Fall News from the in San Francisco. Association for the Advancement Classic Paper Award of Artificial Intelligence The 2011 AAAI Classic Paper Award was given to the authors of the most influential papers from the Tenth Na - tional Conference on Artificial Intelli - gence, held in 1992 in San Jose, Cali - fornia. The award was presented to Mitchell received his BSc in cognitive process. The winning papers were se - Hector Levesque, David Mitchell, and science and artificial intelligence at lected by the program chairs with the Bart Selman for their two papers, Hard the University of Toronto, his MSc in help of area chairs and members of the and Easy Distribution of SAT Problems computing science from Simon Fraser senior program committee. Honors and A New Method for Solving Hard University, and his PhD in computer went to Jessica Davies (University of Satisfiability Problems. These papers science from the University of Toron - Toronto), George Katsirelos (LRI, Uni - were honored for their significant con - tributions to the area of automated to. versité Paris Sud 11), Nina Narodytska reasoning via methods and analyses Bart Selman is a professor of com - (NICTA and University of New South on satisfiability, providing founda - puter science at Cornell University. He Wales), and Toby Walsh (NICTA and tional insights about constraint satis - previously was at AT&T Bell Laborato - University of New South Wales) for faction and search. ries. His research interests include effi - Complexity of and Algorithms for Bor - Hector Levesque received his Ph.D. cient reasoning procedures, planning, da Manipulation; and Daniel Golovin from the University of Toronto in knowledge representation, and con - (Caltech), Andreas Krause (ETH 1981. After graduation, he accepted a nections between computer science Zürich), Beth Gardner (NCSU), Sarah J. position at the Fairchild Lab for AI Re - and statistical physics. He has au - Converse (USGS Patuxent WRC), and search in Palo Alto, and then joined thored or coauthored more than 100 Steve Morey (USFWS) for Dynamic Re - the faculty at the University of Toron - publications, six of which received source Allocation in Conservation to where he has remained since 1984. best paper awards. His papers have ap - Planning . Levesque has published over 60 re - peared in venues spanning Nature, Sci - ence, Proceedings of the National Acade - AAAI-11 Program search papers, and is the coauthor of a Committee Awards 2004 textbook on knowledge repre - my of Sci ence, and a variety of confer - sentation and reasoning. In 1985, he ences and journals in AI and computer AAAI-11 program cochairs Wolfram received the Computers and Thought science. He has received the Cornell Burgard and Dan Roth recognized the Award given by IJCAI. He is a found - Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching following members of the AAAI-11 ing fellow of the AAAI, and was a co- Award, the Cornell Outstanding Edu - Program Committee for their distin - founder of the International Confer - cator Award, an NSF Career Award, guished service on the committee. ence on Principles of Knowledge Rep - and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fel - These individuals used extreme care, resentation and Reasoning. In 2001, lowship. He is a Fellow of the Associa - thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and Levesque was the conference chair of tion for the Advancement of Artificial diligence in the execution of their du - IJCAI-01, and served as president of Intelligence and a Fellow of the Amer - ties while serving on the Program the Board of Trustees of IJCAI from ican Association for the Advancement Committee. 2001 to 2003. of Science. AAAI-11 Outstanding Senior Program David G. Mitchell is an associate pro - Committee Members fessor of computing science at the AAAI-11 Outstanding José Neira (University of Zaragoza, Computational Logic Laboratory, Paper Awards Spain) School of Computing Science, Simon This year, AAAI’s Conference on Artifi - Kilian Q. Weinberger (Washington Uni - Fraser University, Canada. His research cial Intelligence honored two papers versity in St. Louis, USA) interests include logic and complexity, that exemplify high standards in tech - SAT, constraint satisfaction, constraint nical contribution and exposition. Pa - AAAI-11 Outstanding Program Com - languages, grounding, combinatorial pers were recommended for outstand - mittee Member optimization, bioinformatics, plan - ing status by members of the Program Shane Bergsma (Johns Hopkins Univer - ning, and van der Waerden numbers. Committee during the blind review sity, USA) Copyright © 2011, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602 FALL 2011 3 AAAI News AAAI Executive Council Nominations Every two years, the AAAI membership elects an individ - ual to serve a two-year term as president-elect, followed by two years as president, and, finally, two years as immediate past president. In addition, every year four new councilors are elected to serve three-year terms on the AAAI Executive Council. All elected officers and councilors AAAI Distinguished Service Award are expected to attend at least two council meetings per year, The 2011 AAAI Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual and actively participate in AAAI for extraordinary service to the AI community. The AAAI Awards Com - activities. mittee is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient was David L. Nominees must be current Waltz, Director, Center for Computational Learning Systems, Columbia members of AAAI. The Nomi - University. Waltz was honored specifically for his extraordinary and nating Committee encourages long-term technical contributions to artificial intelligence including all regular members in good ground-breaking work in computer vision, memory-based reasoning, standing to place an individual’s classification, and information retrieval, and dedicated organizational name before them for consider - leadership within the AI research community. Beyond the influence of ation. (Student and library his ideas and guidance, his insights, wisdom, and generous mentorship members are not eligible to sub - have been of great value in the nurturing and support of numerous stu - mit candidates’ names.) The dents and colleagues. Nominating Committee, in David L. Waltz has been director of the Center for Computational turn, will nominate one candi - Learning Systems (CCLS) at Columbia University since 2003. He was for - date for president-elect and merly president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from eight candidates for councilor in 1984 –1993 was director of advanced information systems at Thinking the spring. In addition to mem - Machines Corporation and Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis bers’ recommendations, the University. He had also been a professor of electrical and computer en - committee will actively recruit gineering at the University of Illinois (CSL and ECE Department) for 11 individuals in order to provide a years. Waltz served as president of AAAI from 1997 –1999, and is a Fel - balanced slate of candidates. low of AAAI and ACM, a Senior Member of IEEE. and former Chairman AAAI members will vote in the of ACM SIGART. He is currently on the Army Research Lab Technical Ad - late spring. visory Board and the Advisory Board of the Florida Institute for Human To submit a candidate’s name and Machine Cognition, the Technical Advisory Board of 4C (Cork Con - for consideration, please send straint Computation Center, Ireland) and has served on recent external the individual’s name, address, advisory boards for Rutgers University, Carnegie-Mellon University, phone number, and email ad - Brown University, and EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne). dress to Carol Hamilton, Execu - He is on the Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the Com - tive Director, AAAI, 445 Burgess puting Community Consortium Board of the Computing Research As - Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025; sociation, and NSF Computer Science Advisory Board. by fax to 650/321-4457; or by Waltz received all his degrees from MIT, including his Ph.D. for work email to [email protected]. at the MIT AI Lab. His thesis on computer vision originated the field of Nominators should contact constraint propagation, and with Craig Stanfill, he originated the field candidates prior to submitting of memory-based reasoning branch of Case-Based Reasoning. His cur - their names to verify that they rent primary research interest is in machine learning applications, espe - are willing to serve, should they cially to the electric power grid. His research interests have also includ - be elected. ed massively parallel information retrieval, data mining, learning and The deadline for nominations automatic classification with applications protein structure prediction, is November 1, 2011. and natural language processing. 4 AI MAGAZINE AAAI News 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium Series Registration The Association for the Advance - 2011 Robert S. Engelmore ment of Artificial Intelligence’s 2011 Fall Symposium Series will be held Fri - Memorial Lecture Award day through Sunday, November 4 –6 at The Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture award was estab - the Westin Arlington Gateway, Arling - lished in 2003 to honor Dr. Robert S. Engelmore’s extraordi - ton Virginia, adjacent to Washington, nary service to AAAI, AI Magazine, and the AI applications DC. The Symposium Series will be pre - community, and his contributions to applied AI. The annual ceded on Thursday, November 3 by a keynote lecture is presented at the Innovative Applications of one-day AI funding seminar. Artificial Intelligence Conference. Topics encompass Bob’s The titles of the seven symposia are wide interests in AI, and each lecture is linked to a subsequent as follows: article published upon approval by AI Magazine. The lecturer Advances in Cognitive Systems and, therefore, the author for the magazine article, are chosen Building Representations of Common jointly by the IAAI Program Committee and the editor of AI Ground with Intelligent Agents Magazine.