The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the Computers and Thought Award are made by the IJCAII Board of Trustees, upon recommendation by the IJCAI Awards Selection Committee, which consists this year of
Daniel Bobrow (Palo Alto, USA)
C. Raymond Perrault (Menlo Park, USA)
Ross Quinlan (Sydney, Australia)
Erik Sandewall (Linköping, Sweden)
Wolfgang Wahlster (Saarbruecken, Germany, Chair)
The IJCAI Awards Selection Committee receives advice from members of the IJCAI Awards Review Committee, who comment on the accuracy of the nomination material and provide additional information about the nominees. The IJCAI Awards Review Committee is the union of the former Trustees of IJCAII, the IJCAI-99 Advisory Committee, the Program Chairs of the last three IJCAI conferences, and the past recipients of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence and the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award, with nominees excluded.
| IJCAI-99 Award for Research Excellence |
The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is given at the IJCAI conference to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality, yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this award are John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), and Aravind Joshi (1997).
The winner of the 1999 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence is Judea Pearl, Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of California Los Angeles, USA. Professor Pearl is recognized for his fundamental work on heuristic search, reasoning under uncertainty, and causality. He will deliver a lecture entitled Reasoning with Cause and Effect, Thursday August 5, 17.30-18.30, room ABC.
The talk will summarize models, principles, and tools that were found useful in applications involving causal reasoning, including knowledge mining, policy prediction, explanation, and counterfactuals. The principles build on structural-model semantics in which actions are interpreted as surgeries on mechanisms and causes transmit the impact of such surgeries.
| IJCAI Computers and Thought Award |
The Computers and Thought Award is presented at IJCAI conferences to outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence. The award was established with royalties received from the book "Computers and Thought", edited by Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman; it is currently supported by income from IJCAII funds.
Past recipients of this honor have been Terry Winograd (1971), Patrick Winston (1973), Chuck Rieger (1975), Douglas Lenat (1977), David Marr (1979), Gerald Sussman (1981), Tom Mitchell (1983), Hector Levesque (1985), Johan de Kleer (1987), Henry Kautz (1989), Rodney Brooks (1991), Martha Pollack (1991), Hiroaki Kitano (1993), Sarit Kraus (1995), Stuart Russell (1995), and Leslie Kaelbling (1997).
The winner of the 1999 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award is Nicholas R. Jennings, Professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering of the Queen Mary & Westfield College, University of London, UK. Professor Jennings is recognized for his contributions to practical agent architectures and his applied work in the field of multi-agent systems. He will deliver a lecture entitled Agent-Based Computing: Promise and Perils, Tuesday August 3, 17.30-18.30, room ABC.
Agent-based computing represents an exciting new synthesis both for Artificial Intelligence and, more generally, Computer Science. It has the potential to significantly improve the theory and the practice of modeling, designing, and implementing complex systems. In this talk we explore what makes agents such an appealing and powerful conceptual model and argue that scaleable software systems require agents that can perform effectively in dynamic and uncertain environments interacting via flexible organizational structures.
| The Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award |
The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 by the IJCAII Trustees to honor senior scientists in AI for contributions and service to the field during their careers. Previous recipients have been Bernard Meltzer (1979), Arthur Samuel (1983), Donald Walker (1989), Woodrow Bledsow (1991) and Daniel G. Bobrow (1993).
In 1993, the IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was renamed the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award in memory of the late Donald E. Walker, who shaped the IJCAII organization as a Secretary-Treasurer.
At IJCAI-99, the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award will be given to Wolfgang Bibel, Professor for Intellectics at the Department of Computer Science of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology in Germany. As a pioneering researcher in automated deduction, Professor Bibel is recognized for his outstanding contributions and service to the international AI community including his creation of ECCAI, which has operated since 1982 as an umbrella organization of 27 European societies for Artificial Intelligence.
The award will be given during the opening ceremony, Monday August 2, 5.30 pm.
| Distinguished papers |
Learning in Natural Language
Dan Roth
The paper presents a learning theory account of the major statistical approaches to learning in natural language. A class of
Linear Statistical Queries (LSQ) hypotheses is defined and many statistical learners used in natural language are shown to be in this class.
The coherent view of learning approaches in this context may help to develop better learning methods and an understanding of the role of learning in
natural language inferences.
The paper will be presented
Friday, August 6, 2 pm-3.30 pm in Room Aulan, Norra Latin
This paper describes the implementation of a distributed case-based reasoning application that supports engineering sales staff. The application operates on
the world wide web and uses the XML standard as a communications protocol between client and server side Java applets. The paper describes the distributed
architecture of the application, the two case retrieval techniques used, its implementation, trial and roll-out, detailing the benefits it has provided to the company.
The paper will be presented
Friday, August 6, 11 am-12.30 pm in Room C Folkets Hus
| More Information |
For more information about the winners please refer to the following web pages:
| Professor Wolfgang Bibel | http://kirmes.inferenzsysteme.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~bibel/ |
| Professor Nick Jennings | http://web.elec.qmw.ac.uk/staff/nrj.htm |
| Professor Judea Pearl | http://singapore.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html |