AAAI News

Congratulations to the 2011 AAAI Award Winners! , 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 for their two papers, Hard the , 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 . 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 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, , 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 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, , 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. Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy, In - AAAI congratulates the 2011 recipient of this award, Ra - formation and Intelligence mon Lopez de Mantaras, Artificial Intelligence Research Insti - Multiagent Coordination under Uncer - tute (IIIA) and Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Dr. tainty Lopez de Mantaras was honored for his pioneering research Open Government Knowledge: AI Op - contributions in a breadth of artificial intelligence areas, es - portunities and Challenges pecially pattern recognition and case-based reasoning, lead - Question Generation ing to novel applications in design, diagnosis, and music, and for extensive international leadership and service for the AI Robot-Human Teamwork in Dynamic community. He presented his talk, Playing with Cases: Ren - Adverse Environment dering Expressive Music Performance with Case-Based Rea - An informal reception will be held soning, at the recent Innovative Applications of Artificial In - on Friday, November 4. A general ple - telligence Conference in San Francisco. The talk will be avail - nary session, in which the highlights able at videolectures.net soon. of each symposium will be presented, Ramon Lopez de Mantaras is a re - will be held on Saturday, November 5. search professor in the Spanish Na - Symposia will be limited to between tional Research Council (CSIC) and forty and sixty participants. Each par - director of the Artificial Intelligence ticipant will be expected to attend a Research Institute (IIIA). He earned single symposium. In addition to in - his MS in computer science from vited participants, a limited number of the University of California, Berke - other interested parties will be allowed ley, a PhD in physics from the Uni - to register in each symposium on a versity of Toulouse, and a PhD in first-come, first-served basis. computer science from the Techni - AAAI Technical Reports will be dis - cal University of Barcelona. He is an tributed to participants in each sym - associate editor of the AI Journal, and an editorial board mem - posium, and will be added to the AAAI ber of several international journals including AI Magazine. He Digital Library after the symposium. was program committee chairman of UAI-94 and ECML-00, The final deadline for registration is conference chairof ECAI-04, ECML-07 and IJCAI-07, and is an October 14, 2011. ECCAI Fellow and recipient of several awards including EC - For registration information, please CAI’s DEC European AI Research Paper Award, the “City of contact AAAI at [email protected] or visit Barcelona” Research Prize, and the International Computer AAAI’s web site at www.aaai.org/Sym - Music Association “Swets & Zeitlinger” Award. Lopez de Man - posia/Fall/fss11. php. taras was president of the Board of Trustees of IJCAI from 2007 A hotel room block has been re - to 2009. His research interests include case-based reasoning, served at the Westin. The cut-off date machine learning, artificial intelligence and music, and object for reservations is October 10, 2011. recognition for . Please call 1-800-937-8461 for further information, or reserve a room online via the URL noted previously.

FALL 2011 5 AAAI News

AAAI Executive Council Minutes The AAAI Executive Council held a teleconference meeting on March 20, 2011. Attending: Henry Kautz, Manuela Veloso, , Ted Senator, Car - la Brodley, Maria Fox, Amy Green - wald, Adele Howe, Mark Maybury, Tuomas Sandholm, Toby Walsh, Di - eter Fox, David Leake Not Attending: Claire Cardie, Rao Kambhampati, Gal Kaminka, Seventh AAAI Conference on Jonathan Schaeffer, Alan Schultz, Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Tony Cohn. Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-11) Past president Eric Horvitz wel - comed all participants to the meeting, and roll call was taken at 11:45 am Join Us for AIIDE-11 PDT. The minutes for July 2010 were approved. The Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and In - Spring Symposium: In recent years it teractive Digital Entertainment will be held at Stanford Univer - has become increasingly difficult to sity, October 10 –14, 2011. AIIDE is the definitive point of inter - develop a program for the Spring Sym - action between interactive entertainment software developers posium Series. The Council discussed interested in AI and academic and industrial AI researchers. possible reasons for this, including the proliferation of conferences and work - Sponsored by AAAI, the conference is targeted at both the re - shops, the possible need for a move to search and commercial communities, promoting AI research a new venue, the overlap with spring and practice in the context of interactive digital entertainment vacations, and the lack of attractive systems with an emphasis on commercial computer and video topics. Most people agreed that the games. AIIDE-11 will include invited talks by Robert Zubek topics of the symposia will be the driv - (Zynga), Akhil Madhani (Walt Disney Imagineering R&D), Dan ing force in attracting people to the Kline and Lauren McHugh (Maxis), Louis Gascoigne (Electron - symposium, and that the committee ic Arts), and Bob Fitch (Blizzard), as well as technical paper pre - should redouble its efforts to recruit sentations and a poster/demo session. In addition, the work - interdisciplinary symposia with strong shop program has been extended to include the following two and diverse organizing committees. workshops: Marjorie Skubic will step down as chair of the Symposium Committee Intelligent Narrative Technologies will be a two-day) workshop. after the 2011 Fall Symposium Series. It is organized by Emmett Tomai (University of Texas - Pan Chad Jenkins will replace her as the American), Jon Rowe (North Carolina State University), and chair of the Symposium Committee. David Elson (Columbia University/Google) Matt Taylor has been proposed as the next cochair. The Council approved Artificial Intelligence in the Game Design Process will be a one- his appointment for this position. day workshop. It is organized by Adam M. Smith and Gillian IJCAI Issues: IJCAI notified AAAI in Smith (University of California, Santa Cruz) the fall of 2010 that it was considering a move to an annual conference, and Registration information is now available at the AAAI AIIDE-11 sought feedback from AAAI and other website (www.aaai.org/Conferences/AIIDE/aiide11.php). The regional and national AI societies. late registration deadline is September 16. Registrations will al - Since that time, the AAAI officers have so be accepted onsite at Tresidder Union, 459 Lagunita Drive, been in discussions with IJCAI, and on the Stanford Campus. have expressed concerns about the im - pact of this move on AAAI. Of particu - For more information about registration or hotels in the area, lar concern were AAAI’s desire to con - please consult the URL above, or write to [email protected]. tinue to work with IJCAI when it lo - cates in North America, the impact of no AAAI membership discounts of - fered during IJCAI years, and the lack

6 AI MAGAZINE AAAI News

of a proposed international rotation schedule for an annual IJCAI confer - ence. IJCAI has been very reassuring about its desire to work closely with other organizations to make sure that their transition to an annual confer - ence will be beneficial to all. AAAI of - ficers will meet with IJCAI to discuss all concerns and opportunities, in - cluding more visibility and involve - ment for the host organization in the brand of the conference. In addition, 2012 AAAI Spring Symposium AAAI will review its agreement with IJ - Call for Participation CAI to be sure that there is no need for modifications with a new rotation AAAI presents the 2012 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Mon - scheme. day – Wednesday, March 26 –28, 2012, at . The International Committee: Eric Horvitz titles of the six symposia are as follows: reported that the International Com - AI, The Fundamental Social Aggregation Challenge, and the Auton - mittee, chaired by Maria Fox, has been omy of Hybrid Agent Groups discussing ways for AAAI to raise Organizers: W. F. Lawless, [email protected], and Don Sofge, awareness about AI throughout the [email protected]) world and to help societies communi - Designing Intelligent Robots: Reintegrating AI cate better with each other. David Organizers: George Konidaris, Byron Boots, Stephen Hart, Todd Hester, Leake, editor of AI Magazine, suggested Sarah Osentoski, David Wingate (people.csail.mit.edu/gdk/dir) that a new feature be created for the Game Theory for Security, Sustainability and Health magazine that would feature interna - Organizerst: Bo An, Vincent Conitzer, Manish Jain, Sarit Kraus, Sarvapali tional news. He also mentioned that Ramchurn, Milind Tambe (teamcore.usc.edu/GT-Symposium.htm) he has been encouraging more inter - Intelligent Web Services Meet Social Computing national submissions to the magazine Organizers: Tomas Vitvar, Harith Alani, David Martin (vitvar.com/events/ in general. aaai-ss12) AAAI-13 and Future Years: Carol Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness Hamilton reviewed the venue options Organizers: Takashi Kido and Keiki Takadama (mednlp.jp/AAAI2012) for AAAI-13, including San Diego, Wisdom of the Crowd Bellevue, Washington, New Orleans, Organizers: Caroline Pantofaru, Sonia Chernova, Alexander Sorokin (wil - Anchorage, and Minneapolis. After lowgarage.com/workshops/2012/wisdom_of_the_crowd) considering several criteria, most im - portantly attractiveness to attendees, Submissions for the symposia are due on October 7, 2011. Notifi - price point, local AI community, etc., cation of acceptance will be given by November 4, 2011. Material to be included in the technical reports of the symposium must be the Council decided to narrow down received by January 20, 2012. The complete Call for Participation the search to two cities, and asked is available at http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss12.php. Hamilton to conduct a straw poll after Registration information will be available by December 15, 2011. the meeting. The Council was encour - aged to provide information regarding Please contact AAAI at [email protected] with any questions. local sponsorship possibilities that would be helpful in making the final decision. The Council also agreed that issuing a call for proposals for future conference years was a good idea to engage the local community in pro - moting sponsorship and local involve - Support AAAI Open Access ment. Hamilton will issue the first CFP AAAI wishes to thank you for your ongoing support of the open access initia - as soon as the IJCAI decision about its tive and all AAAI programs through the continuation of your AAAI member - future conferences is made. ship. We count on you to help us deliver the latest information about artifi - AAAI Challenge: Henry Kautz led a cial intelligence to the scientific community. To enable us to continue this ef - discussion on instituting a series of fort, we invite you to consider an additional gift to AAAI. For information on challenges at the conference, such as how you can contribute to the open access initiative, please see General Question Answering or Gen - http://www.aaai.org and click on “Gifts.” eral Car Driving. The challenge might span several conferences with stages of

FALL 2011 7 AAAI News

Henry Kautz, Red Whittaker, , and Eric Horvitz at AAAI-11 after presentation of the Feigenbaum Award.

Thrun and Whittaker Accept Feigenbaum Award

Sebastian Thrun, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and Director of the Stanford AI Lab at Stanford University, and William A. “Red” Whittaker, Professor, at Carnegie Mellon University, accepted their awards as the winners of the inaugural 2011 Feigenbaum Prize at AAAI-11 in San Francisco. Thrun and Whittaker were recognized in particular for high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovation and achievement in autonomous vehicle research, transitioning the concept of an autonomous vehicle from the realm of fiction to reality. The AAAI Feigenbaum Prize is awarded biennially to recognize and encourage outstanding AI research ad - vances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science. The “laboratories” for the exper - imental work are real-world domains, and the power of the research results are demonstrated in those do - mains. The Feigenbaum Prize may be given for a sustained record of high-impact seminal contributions to experimental AI research; or it may be given to reward singular remarkable innovation and achievement in experimental AI research. The prize is $10,000 and is provided by the Feigenbaum Nii Foundation and ad - ministered by AAAI.

development, but would probably not suggested that AAAI commemorate the Council about ideas for ways to last more than three years. Kautz sug - this in some way, such as a special commemorate this anniversary at the gested holding a workshop to develop panel. He will brainstorm ideas with conference in San Francisco. She ideas for this event. others, and report back at the summer hopes to form a panel of people who Turing Anniversary: Toby Walsh re - meeting. were present at the 1980 conference to minded the Council that the 50th Tur - AAAI Conference 25th Anniversary: address the attendees. The meeting ad - ing Anniversary will be in 2012, and Manuela Veloso elicited feedback from journed at 1:30 PM PDT.

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Join us in Toronto for AAAI-12 and IAAI-12!

The Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelli - ed several years ago. The Call for Papers for the main gence (AAAI-12) and the Twenty-Fourth Conference on technical track and other tracks will be available this fall Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI- at www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/ aaai12.php 12) will be held July 22-26 in Toronto, Canada. Toronto In addition to the main technical program, AAA-11 is a bustling urban metropolis, but also a city dedicated will include the tutorial forum, workshop program, to its natural beauty. The city is home to such landmarks video competition, robot program, student abstracts as the CN Tower, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the program, the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium, and Art Gallery of Ontario, and also boasts dozens of parks, the third AAAI Educational Advances in Artificial Intel - gardens, lakeshore trails, and conservation areas. Toron - ligence Symposium, to name only a few of the high - to has a thriving film and theater culture, which in - lights. For complete information on these programs, in - cludes its annual film festival. The conference will be cluding Tutorial and Workshop Call for Proposals, please held at the Sheraton Centre Toronto, located in the fi - visit the AAAI-12 website or write to us at aaai12@aaai. nancial and entertainment districts, and connected to org. PATH, a 16-mile underground network of shops and The IAAI-12 conference will use technical papers, in - services. For more information, please visit www.see - vited talks, and panel discussions to explore issues, torontonow.com. methods, and lessons learned in the development and AAAI-11 welcomes submissions on mainstream AI deployment of AI applications, and to promote an in - topics as well as novel crosscutting work in related areas. terchange of ideas between basic and applied AI. IAAI-12 Topics include but are not limited to the following: will consider papers in two tracks: deployed application agent-based and multi-agent systems, cognitive model - case studies and emerging applications or methodolo - ing and human interaction, commonsense reasoning, gies. For more information and a full call for papers, computer vision, constraint satisfaction, search, and op - please see www.aaai.org/Conferences/IAAI/iaai12.php. timization, evolutionary computation, game playing The AAAI-12 program cochairs are Joerg Hoffmann and interactive entertainment, information retrieval, in - (INRIA, France) and Bart Selman (Cornell University, tegration, and extraction, knowledge acquisition and USA). ontologies, knowledge representation and reasoning, The IAAI-12 conference chair is Markus Fromherz machine learning and data mining, model-based sys - (ACS, a Xerox Company, USA). The IAAI-12 cochair is tems, multidisciplinary ai, natural language processing, Hector Munoz-Avila (Lehigh University, USA) planning and scheduling, probabilistic reasoning, ro - botics, web and information systems. AAAI-12 will con - We hope to see you in Toronto next summer! tinue the highly successful special tracks program creat -

FALL 2011 9 AAAI News

ICWSM-12 to be held in Dublin, Ireland! The Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will be held at Trinity Col - lege in Dublin, Ireland, June 4-7, 2012. This highly successful, interdisciplinary conference brings together researchers and industry leaders interested in creat - ing and analyzing social media. Past conferences have included technical pa - pers from areas such as computer science, linguis - tics, communications, and the social sciences. A full Call for Papers will be avail - able this fall at www. icwsm.org, and papers will be due in early January 2012. As in previous con - ferences, collections of so - cial-media data will be pro - vided by ICWSM-12 organ - izers to potential par - ticipants to encourage ex - perimentation on common problems and datasets. For more information, please write to [email protected].

New Publishing Opportunities with AAAI Press

AAAI Press is pleased to announce that we are now able to offer potential authors a wider range of publishing op - portunities including the possibility of producing e-books and very short print runs, enabling us to publish books to niche markets which would not previously have been financially viable. We therefore are now welcoming pro - posals from authors for either monographs or edited collections with a well-defined focus. For accepted proposals, AAAI Press is able to offer full production facilities, including cover design, proof reading, and marketing in e-book catalogues and via AI Magazine and conference stands. Royalties will be payable once sufficient copies have been sold to cover initial fixed production costs.

Please contact the AAAI Press editor-in-chief via [email protected] or any member of the AAAI Press Editorial Board. Further information can be found at www.aaai.org/press.

10 AI MAGAZINE AAAI News

Past-president Eric Horvitz and President Henry Kautz congratulate new senior memebers Leora Morgenstern, Ted Senator, Holly Yanco, Tad Hogg, and Ramasamy Uthurusamy.

AAAI Launches Senior Member Program! AAAI announced its first class of AAAI Senior Members at the recent 25th AAAI Conference in San Fran - cisco. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant ac - complishments within the field of artificial intelligence. To be eligible for nomination for Senior Member, candidates must be consecutive members of AAAI for at least five years and have been active in the pro - fessional arena for at least ten years.

AAAI congratulates the new Senior Members:

Marie desJardins (University of Maryland Baltimore County) Hans W. Guesgen (Massey University) Tad H. Hogg (Institute for Molecular Manufacturing) Diane J. Litman (University of Pittsburgh) João Pavão Martins (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Technical University of Lisbon) Leora Morgenstern (SAIC) Ted E. Senator (SAIC) Ramasamy Uthurusamy (General Motors) Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts Lowell)

FALL 2011 11 AAAI News

reception during the conference. Our thanks go to Arnav Jhala and David ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award Aha for all their work in pulling off this exciting event in San Francisco. Honors Takeo Kanade The winners of the six awards were as follows: AAAI is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2010 ACM/AAAI Best Video Allen Newell Award. The award is presented annually to an individ - Swarmanoid, The Movie ual or individuals whose career contributions display breadth within Marco Dorigo, Mauro Birattari, Rehan computer science, or bridge computer science and other disciplines. O’Grady, and 33 others (IRIDIA-Bel - This year, AAAI Fellow Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University, is gium, IDSIA-Switzerland, LSRO- being honored for his fundamental contributions to research in com - puter vision and robotics, for applications to driving, 3D vision and Switzerland, LIS-Switzerland, ISTC- quality of life technology, and for promoting the interaction between Italy). computer science and other disciplines, most notably robotics. The Best Short Video award, which is cosponsored by the Association for Computing Ma - BioSleeve chinery (ACM) and AAAI, comes with a cash prize of $10,000. Kanade Adrian Stoica, Chris Assad, Kisung was presented with the award by ACM officials and AAAI representa - You, Michael Wolf, Marco Pavone, Yu - tive Edward A. Feigenbaum at the ACM Awards Banquet in San Jose, mi Iwashita, and Talita Sono (Jet California in June. Propulsion Laboratory). Takeo Kanade’s contributions to computer vision and robotics bal - ance fundamental theoretical insights with practical, real-world ap - Best Student Video plications. His research covers a remarkable range of areas, including Autonomous Robot Skill Acquisition motion detection and analysis, direct drive manipulators, face detec - Scott Kuindersma and George tion and analysis, three dimensional shape recovery from stereo vi - Konidaris (University of Massachu - sion and from motion analysis, video surveillance and monitoring, setts Amherst and CSAIL, Massachu - and many other topics. His results are based on keen algorithmic in - setts Institute of Technology). sights, supported by sound mathematical and physical principles, and rigorous implementation and evaluation of deployed systems. Such Best Educational Video applications include medical robots for surgical assistance, “virtual - Robotic Secrets Revealed Ep 002: The ized reality” systems for capturing and visualizing three-dimensional Trouble Begins scenes, many modern graphical effects in video, and autonomous ve - Laura Hiatt, Anthony Harrison, Wal - hicles and helicopters. Kanade’s work is interdisciplinary throughout, lace Lawson, Eric Martinson, and J. drawing on theories and methods from perception, mechanics, kine - Gregory Trafton (Naval Research Labo - matics, mathematics, and core computer science. ratory). Takeo Kanade has played a major leadership role within the field of vision and robotics. From 1991 to 2001, he was the Director of the Ro - Best Narration botics Institute of Carnegie Mellon. Under his leadership, the Insti - The Bomb Squad: Securing a Checkpoint tute doubled its activities and grew into one of the largest and best- with Human-Robot Team known robotics organizations in the world. He also founded the ro - Ewart de Visser, Paul Scerri, Don Hor - botics Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon in 1989, which has vath, Prasanna Velagapudi, Nathan produced a new generation of roboticists who themselves are now Brooks, Laura Lindzey, and Sean leaders in academia, government, and industry throughout the Owens (Perceptronics Solutions Inc., world. In 2001, he founded the Digital Human Research Center in Carnegie Mellon University). Tokyo, which is dedicated to observing and measuring human func - tions, developing computer models of these functions, and applying Most Innovative them to the design of human-centered systems. Finally, in July 2006, Chiara Robot Plays the Piano Kanade established a new NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology Ashwin Iyengar (Carnegie Mellon Uni - Center, jointly with University of Pittsburgh’s Rehabilitation Science versity) and Technology Department. All of these organizations bring togeth - er researchers from different fields, and serve to bridge interdiscipli - Cosponsors nary boundaries between them. AAAI gratefully acknowledges the gen - erous contributions of AI Journal, the Josef Stefan Institute and VideoLec - 2011 AI Video winning videos were honored during tures.net, all of which made this com - the awards presentation. Videos were petition possible. Competition Winners nominated for awards in six cate - The fifth annual AI video competition gories, and winners received a gold AAAI offers its congratulations to all the was held during AAAI-11 and several Shakey award following the opening winners!

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