AI Theory and Practice: Hard Challenges and Opportunities Ahead

Speaker Details

Devika Subramanian obtained her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and her PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1989. She is presently a Professor of Computer Science at Rice University, where she has been on the faculty since 1995. Her research interests are in the design and analysis of embedded adaptive systems and their applications in science and engineering (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~devika). Subramanian served as co-Program Chair for AAAI in 1999, and was on the IJCAI Advisory Board in 2001. She has given many invited lectures on her work, including an invited lecture at IJCAI 1993 on her work on opto-mechanical design. She has won teaching awards at Stanford, Cornell and at Rice. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Texas Advanced Technology Program.

Carlos Guestrin’s current research spans the areas of planning, reasoning and learning in uncertain dynamic environments, focusing on applications in sensor networks. He is an assistant professor in the Machine Learning and in the Computer Science Departments at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the Intel Research Lab in Berkeley. Carlos received his MSc and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and a Mechatronics Engineer degree from the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1998. Carlos Guestrin received best paper awards at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2007), the Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) in 2005 and 2006, the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB-2004), and the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-2003) conferences, runner-up best paper awards at the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2005) and Machine Learning (ICML-2005) conferences, and the 2007 IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper prize in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). He is also a recipient of the NSF Career Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, IBM Faculty Fellowship, the Siebel Scholarship and the Stanford Centennial Teaching Assistant Award.

Jim Hendler is the Tetherless World Chair of Computer and Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also the Associate Director of the Web Science Research Initiative headquartered at MIT. One of the inventors of the “Semantic Web,” Hendler was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the British Computer Society. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002 and. He is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and is the first computer scientist to serve on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.

Eric Horvitz, today’s guest, joined Microsoft Research with two colleagues in 1993 to form the Decision Theory and Adaptive Systems group. Since then he has been at the center of a variety of projects focused on machine intelligence and adaptation, and the related tasks of information discovery, collection, and delivery.

Date:
Speakers:
Devika Subramanian, Carlos Guestrin, Jim Hendler, Eric Horvitz, Michael Wellman, Lise Getoor, and Joe Knstan