Remembering Jaime Carbonell

Joining the incoming PhD class at Carnegie Mellon in the late 1980s, I was lucky to have incredible opportunities for faculty advisors and mentors in AI. Jaime Carbonell was among the more junior faculty, continuing the research that he started in his PhD combining natural language, planning, and machine learning. His thesis work addressed how people with different perspectives approach a discussion topic, through reasoning about commonalities and differences, planning how to counter previous points made by the other party, and generating dialogue utterances that took the conversation in an intended direction. I remember asking him why he did not pursue a more focused topic that may have had more impact. He argued that taking an integrated view on intelligence enables us to do better research in AI.