Invited Speakers
Herbert A. Simon's research has ranged from computer science to
psychology, administration, and economics. The thread of
continuity through all his work has been his interest in human
decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications
of these processes for social institutions. In the past 25 years,
he has made extensive use of the computer as a tool for both
simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial
intelligence.
Born in 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Simon was educated in
political science at the University of Chicago (B.A., 1936,
Ph.D., 1943). He has held research and faculty positions at the
University of California (Berkeley), Illinois Institute of
Technology, and since 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he
is Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science
and Psychology. In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986 the National Medal of
Science.
Simon's writings include Administrative Behavior, Human Problem
Solving, jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial,
Scientific Discovery, with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw, and Jan
Zytkow, and Models of My Life (autobiography).
Michael P. Georgeff is the Director of the Australian Artificial
Intelligence Institute (AAII), one of Australia's foremost research and
development organizations for advanced information technology. He is also
a Professorial Associate at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Georgeff was
previously a Program Director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI
International. He was also a member of Stanford University's Center for the
Study of Language and Information, a select group of philosophers, computer
scientists, and linguistics whose aim is to explore the frontiers of human
and machine cognition.
Dr. Georgeff has a B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics from Melbourne
University, Australia, a B.E. in Aeronautical Engineering from Sydney
University, and a Ph.D. from Imperial College, London. His major interests
are in the design of software systems suited to uncertain, dynamic
environments, distributed real-time systems, planning and simulation, and
the philosophy and theory of rational computational "agents." He has
published over 80 major articles, books, and book chapters in these areas.
Dr. Georgeff currently serves as President of the Board of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and was chair of
IJCAI 1997. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, a member of the
Association for Computing Machinery, and a member of the New York Academy
of Sciences.
Craig Boutilier is an Associate Professor of Computer Science
at the University of British Columbia and a member of the
Laboratory for Computational Intelligence. He received his
Ph.D. in 1992 from the University of Toronto. His research
interests are in planning and sequential decision making,
Markov decision processes and reinforcement learning,
probabilistic reasoning, multiagent systems, and knowledge
representation schemes for actions and preferences. He is an
Associate Editor of the international Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research. He is currently on sabbatical leave at
the University of Toronto, supported by an Izaak Walton Killam
Research Fellowship.
HERBERT SIMON
MICHAEL GEORGEFF
CRAIG BOUTILIER