Dana Nau is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, in the Computer Science Department and the Institute for Systems Research. He has co-authored three books, co-edited two others, and has published more than 400 papers in journals and conferences. He is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and AAAI Fellow.
Dr. Nau's primary field of research is AI, but not the kind of AI that's getting all the publicity. Most of his work has been interdisciplinary, and he has worked with researchers in about 8 or 10 different academic disciplines on topics such as game theory, heuristic search, manufacturing process planning, and AI planning and acting. Examples of his accomplishments are the discovery of "pathological" game trees in which looking farther ahead produces worse decisions, the game-playing algorithm used to win the 1997 world championship of computer bridge, several AI planning systems (SHOP, Pyhop, UPOM, others), three graduate-level textbooks on automated planning and acting, and game theoretic studies of factors that affect human behavioral norms.