Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) research within the Department of Computer Science begins with Jack Minker, the first Departmental Chairman 1974-1979 and now Professor Emeritus, who worked for many years in the areas of automated theorem-proving, logic programming, deductive databases, and nonmonotonic reasoning. He was subsequently recognized for his work as the 2005 recipient of the Allen Newell Award from the ACM/AAAI, and as a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The Department also has four other AAAI Fellows: Professor Emeritus Laveen Kanal, Dana Nau, Jim Hendler, and Sarit Kraus. We currently have eleven faculty in the area of artificial intelligence (not counting those in computer vision):
Bonnie Dorr works in multilingual processing, machine translation, summarization, and linguistically informed statistical models. Dorr was an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, 1997-1999, a Maryland Distinguished Young Scientist, 1996, a Sloan Research Fellow, 1994-1996, and an NSF National Young Investigator, 1993-1998.
Lise Getoor has general research interests in machine learning, reasoning under uncertainty, databases. The theme of her research is building and using statistical models of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
Jim Hendler, Professor of Computer Science at RPI and Adjunct Professor at Maryland, is one of the inventors of the Semantic Web, recipient of a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, a Fellow of AAAI, former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at DARPA, and recipient of the US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002.
John Horty has primary interests in Philosophical Logic, Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Science more generally, with secondary interests in the Philosophy of Language, theories of Practical Reasoning, and Ethics.
Sarit Kraus is Professor of Computer Science at Bar Ilan University, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Maryland. Her research interests include negotiation and cooperation among agents and non-classical logics. She is a AAAI Fellow and a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award.
Dana Nau works in AI planning and searching, and computer-integrated design and manufacturing. He is a AAAI Fellow, was an invited speaker at AAAI-05, has received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award, and four "best paper" awards. He co-authored the AI-planning algorithm that enabled Bridge Baron to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge. His SHOP2 planning system won one of the top four awards in the 2002 International Planning Competition, and has been used in hundreds of projects worldwide.
Don Perlis studies commonsense reasoning, including the related areas of cognitive modeling and philosophy of mind and language. An ongoing project is the use of time-situated metacognitive computation (the "metacognitive loop", or MCL) for enhanced flexibility and generality of reasoning. MCL has been applied to nonmonotonic reasoning, real-time planning with deadlines, robot navigation, reinforcement learning, natural-language human-machine dialog, and the tank game BOLO.
Jim Reggia works in the general area of nature-inspired computation, including neural computation, evolutionary computation, and artificial life. Recent work includes very large-scale integrated neurocomputational systems as a basis for machine intelligence, self-organizing maps for processing sequential information, genetic programming to evolve modular neural networks and self-replicating configurations, swarm intelligence systems for collective problem solving, and self-assembly of artificial structures.
Philip Resnik works in machine translation and multilingual natural language processing. As part of this effort, Resnik's postdoc David Chiang developed Hiero, the first syntax-based system to demonstrate performance comparable to state-of-the-art statistical translation systems.
V. S. Subrahmanian is Director of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He received the NSF National Young Investigator Award in 1993 and the Distinguished Young Scientist Award from the Maryland Science Center/Maryland Academy of Science in 1997. His work in AI spans rule-based expert systems and logic programs, nonmonotonic reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, temporal reasoning, hybrid reasoning, and software agents.
Amy Weinberg holds appointments in both Linguistics and Computer Science. She works in language acquisition and multilingual applications, and is co-Director of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory, and of the Language and Media Processing Laboratory.
Many of our former students have gone on to very high levels of achievement, including Vipin Kumar (PhD 1982), Fellow of ACM; Lee Spector (PhD 1992), NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, Fellow of ISGEC; Gary Flake (PhD 1993), Microsoft Distinguished Engineer; Narendra Ahuja (PhD 1979), Fellow of IEEE, AAAI , SPIE, ACM; and Granger Sutton (PhD 1992), whose software was used in the first-ever assembly of the complete whole genome of a free-living organism, the Haemophilus influenzae genome.
