AAAI/EAAI 2018 Outstanding
Educator Award
The AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator
was established in 2016 to recognize a
person (or group of people) who has
(have) made major contributions to AI
education that provide long-lasting
benefits to the AI community. Exam-
ples might include innovating teaching
methods, providing service to the AI
education community, generating ped-
agogical resources, designing curricula,
and educating students outside of high-
er education venues (or the general
public) about AI. AAAI is pleased to
announce the 2018 award is being giv-
en to Todd Neller (Gettysburg College)
for his longstanding dedication and
service to the AI education community
at large, for curating shared resources,
and for advancing and energizing the
field of AI education. This award is
jointly sponsored by AAAI and the Sym-
posium on Educational Advances in
Artificial Intelligence. Todd Neller pre-
sented an invited talk at EAAI- 18, enti-
tled “Playful AI Education.”
Todd W. Neller is a professor of com-
puter science at Gettysburg College.
He received his PhD with distinction
in teaching at Stanford University,
where he was awarded the George E.
Forsythe Memorial Award for excel-
lence in teaching. A game enthusiast,
Neller has since enjoyed pursuing
game AI challenges, computing opti-
mal play for jeopardy dice games such
as Pass the Pigs and bluffing dice games
such as Dudo, creating new reasoning
algorithms for Clue/Cluedo, analyzing
optimal Risk attack and defense poli-
cies, designing logic mazes, and
designing and organizing game and
puzzle research challenges for under-
graduates.
AAAI- 18 Program
Committee Awards
AAAI- 18 Program Cochairs Sheila McIlraith and Kilian Weinberger recognized
the following members of the AAAI- 18
Program Committee for their distinguished service on the committee.
These individuals went above and
beyond the expectations for the role,
showing exceptional judgment, clarity,
knowledgeability, and leadership in
reaching a consensus decision while
serving on the committee.
Outstanding Senior
Program Committee Member
Jörg Hoffmann (Saarland University,
Germany)
Outstanding Program
Committee Members
Thomas Buehler (Avira, Germany)
Olivier Buffet (LORIA/INRIA, France)
Robin Burke (DePaul University, USA)
Anthony Hoogs (Kitware, Inc., USA)
Liping Jing (Beijing Jiaotong University, China)
Lars Kotthoff (University of British
Columbia, Canada)
Jonas Kvarnstrom (Linköping University, Sweden)
Xiangyuan Lan (Hong Kong Baptist
University)
Niklas Lavesson (Blekinge Institute of
Technology, Sweden)
Haiping Lu (The University of
Sheffield, UK)
Ifeoma Nwogu (University of Buffalo,
USA)
Ingo Pill (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
Anna Rafferty (Carleton College, USA)
Miquel Ramirez (The University of
Melbourne, Australia)
2018 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award
This award was established in 2003 to honor Dr. Robert S. Engelmore’s
extraordinary service to AAAI, AI Magazine, and the AI applications
community, and his contributions to applied AI. The annual keynote
lecture is presented at the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference. Topics encompass Bob’s wide interests in AI, and
each lecture is linked to a subsequent article published upon approval
by AI Magazine. The lecturer and, therefore, the author for the magazine article, are chosen jointly by the IAAI Program Committee and
the Editor of the AI Magazine.
AAAI congratulates the 2018 recipient of this award, Stephen F.
Smith, Carnegie Mellon University, who was honored for sustained
research excellence in constraint-based planning and scheduling technologies, deployment of those technologies to a range of significant
real-world problems, and extensive service to the AI community that
includes significant outreach to related technical fields. Smith presented his award lecture, “Smart Infrastructure for Future Urban
Mobility,” at the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence
Conference in New Orleans.
Stephen Smith is a research professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where he
heads the Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory. He is also cofounder and CEO of Rapid Flow
Technologies, an intelligent transportations systems
(ITS) technology company that is commercializing
the Surtrac traffic signal control system. Smith’s
research focuses broadly on the theory and practice of next-generation technologies for planning, scheduling, and coordination. He pioneered the development and use of constraint-based search and optimization models for solving planning and scheduling problems, and
he has successfully fielded AI-based planning and scheduling systems
in several complex application domains. Smith has published over
270 papers on these and related subjects. He recently served as a member of the AAAI Executive Council (2014-2017), is associate editor of
the Journal of Scheduling, and serves on the editorial boards of
Constraints and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. He
was elected AAAI Fellow in 2007.
