AI Magazine - Spring 2018

Honorable Mention: Student 3-Minute
Presentation: Chengqiang Huang,
Yulei Wu, Yuan Zuo, Ke Pei, Geyong
Min for Towards Experienced Anom-
aly Detector through Reinforcement
Learning
AAAI Executive Council
Meeting Minutes
The AAAI Executive Council was held
November 30, 2017 via teleconference.

Attending: Rao Kambhampati, Yolanda
Gil, Tom Dietterich, Ted Senator, David
AAAI- 18 Student
Abstract Awards
The Student Abstract Program Awards
Committee selected two presentations
to be honored for the Best Student 3-
Minute Presentation Award. These two
presentations were among 19 finalists
that were presented during a special
session at AAAI-18:

Best Student 3-Minute Presentation: Ellis
Hoag, Janardhan Rao Doppa for
Bayesian Optimization Meets Search
Based Optimization: A Hybrid Ap-
proach for Multi-Fidelity Optimization
Smith, Blai Bonet, Gene Freuder, Diane
Litman, Michela Milano, Cynthia
Rudin, Matthijs Spaan, Kiri Wagstaff,
Ashok Goel, David Leake, Francesca
Rossi, Stephen Smith, Shlomo Zilber-
stein

Not attending: Sonia Chernova, Charles Isbell, Mausam, Claire Monteleoni, Jennifer Neville, Qiang Yang General Updates / Transitions Kambhampati announced that Charles

96 AI MAGAZINE AAAI is sad to report that AAAI Fellow Charles (Chuck)

Rich passed away on January 3, 2018 at the age of 66. He served AAAI as an Executive Councilor (1984-87) and as program cochair of the 1998 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. A professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) since 2007, Rich was a pioneer in AI and human-computer interaction. He was also affiliated with the WPI’s Interactive Media and Game Development, Learning Sciences and Technologies, and Robotics Engineering programs, and had previously served as a principal research scientist at MIT and a founding member and distinguished scientist at the Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratories (MERL).

Rich joined the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as a research scientist in 1980. At MIT, he founded and directed the Programmer’s Apprentice project, which aimed to develop a theory of “how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs,” according to a research overview he coauthored in 1993.

In 1991, Rich joined the staff of MERL, the North
American subsidiary of the corporate research and
development organization of Mitsubishi Electric Cor-
poration. Located in Cambridge, MERL conducted
research in a wide range of fields within electronics
and information technology. Rich and his wife, Can-
dace Sidner, a research professor in computer science at
WPI, worked in the area of collaborative agents. Their
aim was to develop intelligent agents that could pro-
vide a unified conversational interface for all the appli-
ances in a home. As part of that project, Rich and Sid-
ner created a software platform called COLLAGEN, an
application-independent collaboration manager. The
platform, which has had an important influence on
subsequent work in dialogue processing, was used to
develop a number of collaborative agents, including
DiamondHelp, a finalist in two design competitions in
2005. His most recent work with Sonia Chernova,
Dmitry Berenson, Anahita Mohseni-Kabir, and Candy
Sidner, permits the simultaneous learning by a robot
of low level primitive actions and hierarchical task net-
works with minimal demonstrations.

Rich’s research included the Collagen/Disco collaborative dialog manager, an effort at developing and using tools for managing dialog based on the Grosz, Sidner, Lochbaum, Kraus theory of dialog and collaboration; the development in 1995 of the MERL Diamond Park, a social virtual reality world using networked computers; and his most recent work with Sonia Chernova, Dmitry Berenson, Anahita Mohseni-Kabir, and Candy Sidner, which permits the simultaneous learning by a robot of low level primitive actions and hierarchical task networks with minimal demonstrations.

A senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Rich was honored for his early work in artificial intelligence by being elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1992.

He held four patents, including one for systems for collaborative interfaces (with Candace Sidner) and over 70 refereed journal and magazine articles and conference presentations. In addition to his service for AAAI, he served as chair of the 1992 International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, cochaired the 2010 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, and was program cochair of the 2011 International Conference on the Foundation of Digital Games.