AI Magazine - Spring 2018

Spring News from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

AAAI News

sented the AAAI Awards in February at AAAI- 18 in New Orleans.

Distinguished Service Award The 2018 AAAI Distinguished Service Award recognizes one individual for extraordinary service to the AI community. The AAAI Awards Committee is pleased to announce that this year’s recipient is Peter E. Friedland. Friedland is being recognized for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through sustained service nationally in establishing AI R&D at NASA, structuring AI programs at AFOSR, and pioneering service in computational molecular biology.

Peter Friedland’s career has focused on interdisciplinary technology research, development, and application with substantial accomplishments in academia, industry, and government. He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1980 for pioneering artificial intelligence research in the areas of planning, knowledge representation, and expert systems. He applied this work to the then emerging discipline of molecular genetics leading to the creation of a user community of several thousand academic and industrial scientists, and the funding of a NIH-sponsored National Research Resource, BIONET. He also cofounded two companies while at Stanford: IntelliGenetics, the first bioinformatics company, and Teknowledge, the first expert systems technology and training company. Both became public companies in the early 1980s.

In 1987, Friedland joined NASA
Ames Research Center to create what
AAAI Announces
New Senior Members!

AAAI congratulates the following indi-
viduals on their election to AAAI Sen-
ior Member status:
Ariel Felner
(Ben Gurion University, Israel)

Martin Michalowski (University of Minnesota, USA)

Ashish Sabharwal (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, USA)

Ram Sriram (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA)

Matthew Taylor (Washington State University, USA)

Ingmar Weber (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)

This honor was announced at the recent AAAI- 18 Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Senior Member status is designed to recognize AAAI members who have achieved significant accomplishments 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 professional arena for at least ten years.

Congratulations to the
2018 AAAI Award Winners!

Rao Kambhampati, AAAI President,
Tom Dietterich, AAAI Past President
and Awards Committee Chair, and
Yolanda Gil, AAAI President-Elect, pre-
became the government’s largest and
most highly-regarded intelligent sys-
tems R&D laboratory. The hallmark of
the laboratory was the ability to simul-
taneously conduct state-of-the-art
research while also fielding applica-
tions to all of the primary NASA mis-
sions and Centers. He left Ames in
1995 to form and lead his third com-
pany, Intraspect Software, an early
knowledge management systems
provider, to the point of 200 employ-
ees and over $30M in sales. Intraspect
was sold to Vignette Software in 2003,
and Friedland rejoined Ames as chief
technologist, where he supervised a
wide range of technology development
activities in emerging areas like nan-
otechnology. He also chaired several
NASA-wide committees and studies in
such areas as core competencies for
NASA Centers and technology transi-
tion from basic research to fielded
applications.
Friedland is now an independent
technology strategist and consultant
with a majority of his time spent as a
scientific advisor to the Air Force Office
of Scientific Research (AFOSR). His spe-
cific areas of emphasis for AFOSR are
strategy and tactics for international
research investments in all disciplines,
and creation of new programs in com-
puter and cognitive science.

Friedland is a Fellow of AAAI, a recipient of the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, as well as the Feigenbaum International Medal for Expert Systems Applications.