Invited Speakers


HERBERT SIMON

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 GEORGEFF

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

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.