AAAI 2016 Executive Council Candidates PRESIDENT-‐ELECT
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AAAI 2016 Executive Council Candidates PRESIDENT-ELECT (2) Rina Dechter Rina Dechter is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in Computer Science at UCLA in 1985, an MS degree in Applied Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute and a B.S in Mathematics and Statistics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Her research centers on computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation including search, constraint processing and probabilistic reasoning. Professor Dechter is an author of ‘Constraint Processing’ published by Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, and ‘Reasoning with Probabilistic and Deterministic Graphical Models: Exact Algorithms’ by Morgan and Claypool publishers, 2013, has co-authored over 150 research papers, and has served on the editorial boards of: Artificial Intelligence, the Constraint Journal, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS) and journal of Machine Learning (JLMR). She is a fellow of AAAI, a Radcliffe Fellow 2005-2006, received the 2007 Association of Constraint Programming (ACP) research excellence award and is a 2013 Fellow of the ACM. She served as the Program co-chair of AAAI 2002 and as a AAAI councilor, as Program Chair of CP-2000 and Program co-chair of UAI-2006. She has been Co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence, since 2011. Statement AAAI is the leading organization promoting scientific research and education in artificial intelligence. It has been my professional home for more than 30 years, and I am honored to be considered for this leadership position. If elected, I will dedicate myself to giving back and advancing the mission of an organization that has enabled me—and countless others—to collaborate with colleagues in world-class conferences, workshops, and symposia. My primary goal as president will be to encourage and facilitate greater interaction among AI’s subfields. While progress made in some of these subfields is remarkable, our ultimate goal is to assemble all the pieces in a universal intelligent agent, incorporating vision, speech, natural language processing, machine learning, planning, knowledge representation and reasoning. This goal requires extensive cooperation and collaboration and can only be facilitated by having all AI’s parts interact through a unified language and under a single supportive umbrella. AAAI is the organization best positioned to facilitate that ongoing integration project, but it must be a constant priority. AAAI must also remain agile in order to handle emerging issues in a timely manner. I would strive to ensure that AAAI is the key global platform for an ongoing discussion on AI’s future, facilitated through workshops, panels, and articles in the AI magazine and elsewhere. We have a pivotal role in helping shape future research directions and in providing public education. Moreover, AAAI can and should encourage inclusion in the field, and continue to offer leadership in promoting diversity through training and education. Finally, AAAI should continue to broaden its outreach to the international community, especially in order to bring the potentially beneficial impact of AI to the emerging world. To make progress on this agenda, AAAI must be sustained and strengthened by a growing membership. I recognize and embrace the fact that an essential focus of AAAI leadership must be to increase membership by encouraging young researchers to join, in the legacy communities of North America and Europe—and even more so in Asia and the Middle East. Thank you for your consideration. Yolanda Gil Yolanda Gil is Director of Knowledge Technologies at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in Computer Science. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research is in intelligent user interfaces, knowledge-rich collaborative problem solving, and the semantic web. A recent focus is scientific data analysis through semantic workflows. She initiated and chaired the W3C Provenance Group that led to a community standard in this area. She served in the Advisory Committee of the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate of the NSF. She is Chair of ACM SIGAI, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, and is on the Editorial Board of the Artificial Intelligence journal. She was elected Fellow of AAAI in 2012. Statement AAAI is a fantastic organization that greatly benefits our field. I understand how it serves our community from many perspectives, having started as a student volunteer and then author, workshop and symposium organizer, AAAI program co-chair, and finally councilor and AAAI conference committee chair. I have always been impressed by the enthusiasm and creativity of my colleagues in making AAAI a vibrant community. Looking forward, I believe AAAI needs to have a greater presence in the broader science ecosystem and propose here some possibilities. First, I believe AAAI needs to join science initiatives in reproducibility and digital scholarship. From ACM to AAAS, many scientific organizations and conferences are improving the accessibility and persistence of digital research products beyond published articles. Science communities are recommending repositories and best practices for sharing data, software, workflows, and other resources in ways that promote reusability and author credit. AAAI must create best practices for our field, and in doing so it will make our research more visible in other communities. Second, AAAI could do more to promote younger AI researchers. We need to instate a Dissertation Award, if possible in cooperation with ACM SIGAI to raise its visibility in the broader CS community. We should include an Early Career Researcher Keynote at AAAI, and profile young researchers in AI Magazine. We should have a registry of AI thesis abstracts to promote the important ideas that PhD students contribute to our field. I have been a judge for AAAI at the ISEF high school science competition, and have seen that two thirds of their CS projects are actually in AI. One student reported that his hobby is reading AI papers from the 60s. There is tremendous interest that we need to capitalize on to attract the best talent to our field. Finally, I think that we can do more to give AI higher visibility and stronger ties with the CS and science community. AAAI could work with ACM, AAAS, and other organizations to promote AI and involve AI researchers in the broader discussions that are taking place about the future of intelligent systems, autonomy, computer-mediated interactions, and big data in the broader science, government, and social context. EXECUTIVE COUNCILOR (8) Blai Bonet Blai Bonet is a professor in the computer science department at Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research are in the areas of automated planning, heuristic search and knowledge representation. He has received six best paper awards or honorable mentions, including the 2009 and 2014 ICAPS Influential Paper Awards. Blai Bonet is a co-author (with Hector Geffner) of the book titled "A Concise Introduction to Models and Methods for Automated Planning." Blai Bonet is an associate editor of Artificial Intelligence and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, and served as conference co-chair of ICAPS-12 and program co-chair of AAAI-15. Statement Fragmentation and internationalization are the biggest challenges for AAAI over the next few years. The high success of fragmented areas such a ML, NLP, Vision and robotics is affecting traditional AI core areas in many respects, from insufficiency of funds and difficulty to attract the best students to lack of incentives and loss of researchers. On the other hand, the sudden growth of conferences like NIPS and AAMAS, and IJCAI's change of schedule put more pressure on AAAI on how to sustain and even increase its status as the main conference in AI, worldwide. Fortunately, we have seen in the two last AAAI conferences very good signs and opportunities that need to be leveraged for handling these challenges. We saw an incredible increase on the number of submissions and international participants, and on the number of submissions in the fragmented areas. So, AAAI is healthy and strong as an organization but it needs to prepare itself for the times ahead. Discussions on issues such as international representation inside the different committees, internationalization of conferences, and joint ventures with fragmented areas may prove instrumental for making the right decisions. J. Christopher Beck Chris Beck (PhD University of Toronto, 1999) is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to (re)joining UofT, he was a Staff Scientist at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland and a Senior Scientist at ILOG, France. He has been conducting research since 1992 in both AI and Operations Research, focusing on planning and scheduling, constraint programming, and optimization. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications and has given over 100 scholarly presentations in 17 countries. Chris is the President of the Executive Council for the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling and Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (since 2010), Constraints (2008-2013), Journal of Scheduling (2005-2012), and The Knowledge Engineering Review (2005-2015). He has served as the Program/Conference Chair/Co-chair of CPAIOR (2006, 2011), ICAPS (2008), and SARA (2009) and will be the Program Chair for CP2017. Statement While AI becomes increasingly a part of our lives and as society raises important concerns about its implications, AI researchers are fragmented by geography and sub-discipline and lack a unified voice in the media, on funding bodies, and in larger societal discussions. If AAAI wants to be (or be part of) a larger, international collective, I believe that it needs to re-examine its goals and develop paths toward them.