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.
Classic Paper Award
The 2018 AAAI Classic Paper Award
was given to the authors of the