The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.
Bart Selman is a Dutch-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. He is also co-founder and principal investigator of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Stuart J. Russell, and co-chair of the Computing Community Consortium's 20-year roadmap for AI research.
Vasant G. Honavar is an Indian-American computer scientist, and artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, data science, causal inference, knowledge representation, bioinformatics and health informatics researcher and professor.
Alan Mackworth is a professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. He is known as "The Founding Father" of RoboCup. He is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and former Canada Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence from 2001 to 2014.
Moshe Ya'akov Vardi is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist. He is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering at Rice University, United States. and a faculty advisor for the Ken Kennedy Institute. His interests focus on applications of logic to computer science, including database theory, finite model theory, knowledge of multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification and reasoning, and teaching logic across the curriculum. He is an expert in model checking, constraint satisfaction and database theory, common knowledge (logic), and theoretical computer science.
Michael Paul Wellman is the Richard H. Orenstein Division Chair of Computer Science and Engineering and Lynn A. Conway Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
James Frederick Allen is an American computational linguist recognized for his contributions to temporal logic, in particular Allen's interval algebra. He is interested in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning, and natural language understanding, believing that "deep language understanding can only currently be achieved by significant hand-engineering of semantically-rich formalisms coupled with statistical preferences". He is the John H. Dessaurer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester.
Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
The Institute for Computational Sustainability (ICS), founded in 2008 with support from an Expeditions in Computing grant from the National Science Foundation, focuses on the newly emerging field of computational sustainability and aims to apply computational techniques to help solve challenging sustainability problems. Its vision is that "computer scientists can—and should—play a key role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness in the way we manage and allocate our natural resources, while enriching and transforming Computer Science." The institute, headed by Carla Gomes, is a joint venture involving scientists from Cornell University, Bowdoin College, the Conservation Fund, Howard University, Oregon State University, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.
David Leigh Waltz was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He held positions in academia and industry and at the time of his death, was a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University where he directed the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing. Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP, of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.
Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.
Henry A. Kautz is a computer scientist, Founding Director of Institute for Data Science and Professor at University of Rochester. He is interested in knowledge representation, artificial intelligence, data science and pervasive computing.
Francesca Rossi is an Italian computer scientist, currently working at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader.
Dan Roth is the Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the Chief AI Scientist at Oracle. Until June 2024 Dan was a VP/Distinguished Scientist at AWS AI. In his role at AWS Roth led over the last three years the scientific effort behind the first-generation Generative AI products from AWS, including Titan Models, Amazon Q efforts, and Bedrock, from inception until they became generally available.
Michael John Wooldridge is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. His main research interests is in multi-agent systems, and in particular, in the computational theory aspects of rational action in systems composed of multiple self-interested agents. His work is characterised by the use of techniques from computational logic, game theory, and social choice theory.
Carla E. Brodley is a computer scientist specializing in machine learning. Brodley is a Fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is the Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, where she serves as the Executive Director for the Center for Inclusive Computing and holds a tenured appointment in Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Brodley served as dean of Khoury College from 2014-2021. She is a proponent for greater enrollment of women and under-represented minorities in computer science.
Lillian Lee is a computer scientist whose research involves natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and computational social science. She is a professor of computer science and information science at Cornell University, and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that integrates neural and symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each, providing a robust AI capable of reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling. As argued by Leslie Valiant and others, the effective construction of rich computational cognitive models demands the combination of symbolic reasoning and efficient machine learning. Gary Marcus argued, "We cannot construct rich cognitive models in an adequate, automated way without the triumvirate of hybrid architecture, rich prior knowledge, and sophisticated techniques for reasoning." Further, "To build a robust, knowledge-driven approach to AI we must have the machinery of symbol manipulation in our toolkit. Too much useful knowledge is abstract to proceed without tools that represent and manipulate abstraction, and to date, the only known machinery that can manipulate such abstract knowledge reliably is the apparatus of symbol manipulation."
