Biographical Information for Dana Nau

Last updated February 3, 2023

A Very Brief Bio

Dana Nau is an AI researcher who works primarily in the areas of automated planning and game theory. Some of his accomplishments include the discovery of "pathological" game trees in which deeper lookahead produces worse decisions, the strategic planning algorithm used to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge, the SHOP and SHOP2 AI planning algorithms, two graduate-level textbooks on automated planning and acting, and evolutionary game-theoretic studies of the evolution of human behavioral norms. Dr. Nau has more than 300 refereed publications. He is a Fellow of the AAAI, the ACM, and the AAAS.

A Slightly Longer One

Dana Nau is a Professor at the University of Maryland, in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Systems Research. He does research in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of automated planning and game theory. He is an AAAI Fellow, an ACM Fellow, and an AAAS Fellow.

Dr. Nau received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Missouri S&T (then called University of Missouri-Rolla) in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1979. He has more than 300 refereed technical publications, has chaired ICAPS and several other conferences, and has been on the editorial boards of JAIR, ACM TIST, and several other journals. Some of his accomplishments include:

In his PhD research he discovered pathological game trees, in which looking farther ahead produces worse decision-making.
He led the development of SHOP, SHOP2, Pyhop, and GTPyhop. These AI planning systems have been used in thousands of projects worldwide.
He co-authored two graduate-level textbooks: Automated Planning: Theory and Practice (2004), the de facto standard textbook on AI planning; and Automated Planning and Acting (2016).
He co-authored the AI planning and game-tree search algorithm used to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge. Articles about this appeared in several major media.
In collaboration with social psychologists, he has evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of human behavioral norms such as cooperation and punishment and ethnocentrism.
He has supervised or co-supervised 25 PhD graduates and 5 postdoctoral researchers. Seven of them now have faculty positions, one is a former Assistant Director and Acting Director of DARPA DSO, one is an NSF program manager, most of the others are at top research labs.

A Less Formal One

This one has lots of photos and speech balloons.