AAAI News

Tom Mitchell, AAAI past president and Awards Committee chair, and Ron Brachman, AAAI president, presented the AAAI awards in July at AAAI-05 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Award winners received a certificate and a check for $1,000. He formerly held the position of associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington Seattle, and between academic jobs held a variety of industry positions at Harlequin Software, Amazon.com, and other companies. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and an M.B.A. degree from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Drew McDermott has done work in several areas of artificial intelligence. One of his perennial interests is in planning algorithms, which calculate structures of actions for autonomous agents of various sorts. He did seminal work in the area of hierarchical planning in the 1970s. In the last decade, his focus has switched to regressionbased techniques for classical planning, especially methods ...