David L. Waltz, in Memoriam

Waltz served as Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) president from 1997 to 1999, was a Fellow of AAAI and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and former chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). Prior to joining CCLS, he was president of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984-1993 was director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and a professor of computer science at Brandeis University. A celebration of his life was held in the spring of 2012, and a symposium in his honor was held September 23, 2012, at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. That dissertation created the field of constraint propagation by showing that constraints and a rich but simple descriptive system were sufficient to recover threedimensional information from a two-dimensional projection. Besides an education, Dave picked up a passion for the highenergy atmosphere that propelled the MIT AI Lab to prominence -- an atmosphere that he spent the rest of his life recreating. In 1973, Dave Waltz with Richard P. Gabriel in tow headed west from MIT to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with the goals of starting a first-rate AI program and creating a lab in the image of the MIT AI Lab. All they had were an enthusiastic home in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, some friendly faculty in the Electrical Engineering department, a PDP-10, a shaky connection to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), and a small but eager coterie of misfit graduate students.