Distinguished Service Awards

2020

Alan Bundy is Professor of Automated Reasoning in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include: the automation of mathematical reasoning, with applications to reasoning about the correctness of computer software and hardware; and the automatic construction, analysis and evolution of representations of knowledge. His research combines artificial intelligence with theoretical computer science and applies this to practical problems in the development and maintenance of computing systems. He is the author of over 300 publications and has held over 60 research grants.

He is a fellow of several academic societies, including the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB). His awards include the IJCAI Research Excellence Award (2007), the CADE Herbrand Award (2007) and a CBE (2012). He was: Edinburgh's founding Head of Informatics (1998-2001); founding Convener of UKCRC (2000-05); and a Vice President and Trustee of the British Computer Society with special responsibility for the Academy of Computing (2010-12). He was also a member of: the Hewlett-Packard Research Board (1989-91); the ITEC Foresight Panel (1994-96); both the 2001 and 2008 Computer Science RAE panels (1999-2001, 2005-8); and the Scottish Science Advisory Council (2008-12).

2018

Wolfgang Bibel is Professor for Intellectics at the Department of Computer Science of the Darmstadt Institute of Technology in Germany. He also maintains an affiliation with the University of British Columbia as Adjunct Professor. In 1968 he received a Ph.D. degree from the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. For many years he worked at the Technical University of Munich as a Senior Researcher, building up the AI group there. In 1987 he became a Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His more than one hundred and fifty publications range over various areas in artificial intelligence such as automated deduction, machine architecture for deductive systems, program synthesis, knowledge representation, and include also topics concerning the implications of AI technology for society. Dr. Bibel is Section Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, Associate Editor of the Journal for Symbolic Computation, Co-Editor of the AI book series of Vieweg Verlag, and on the board of seven more journals. From 1982 through 1986 he served as the first Chairman of ECCAI, the European AI organization. From 1987 through 1995 he was a Trustee of the International Joint Conferences for Artificial Intelligence, Inc., and held the Conference Chair of IJCAI'89. Currently he is coordinating a national six year research programme on deduction. In 1990 he has been awarded the title of an {\em AAAI Fellow\/} by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) ``in Recognition of Significant Contributions to the Field of Artificial Intelligence''. In 1996 he received the German research excellence award for Artificial Intelligence from the Association of German AI Institutions (AKI). Currently, Dr. Bibel is the conference chair of the 15th International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE-15) taking place 5-10 July 1998 in Lindau, Germany, at the beautiful Lake Constance.

2016

Ramón López de Mántaras is a Research Professor of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA). He has an MSc in Computer Science from the University of California Berkeley, a PhD in Physics (Automatic Control) from the University of Toulouse, and a PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Barcelona. López de Mántaras is a pioneer of artificial intelligence (AI) in Spain, with contributions, since 1976, in pattern recognition, approximate reasoning, expert systems, machine learning, case-based reasoning, autonomous robots, and AI and music. He is the author of nearly 300 papers and an invited plenary speaker at numerous international conferences. Former Editor-in-Chief of AI Communications, he is an editorial board member of several top international journals, an ECCAI Fellow, and the co-recipient of five best paper awards at international conferences. Among other awards, he has received the “City of Barcelona” Research Prize in 1981, the 2011 “American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Award,” the 2012 “Spanish National Computer Science Award” from the Spanish Computer Society, the 2016 “Distinguished Service Award” of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), and the 2017 “IJCAI Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award.” He is a member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC). He serves on a variety of panels and advisory committees for public and private institutions based in the USA and Europe, such as the EC Joint Research Center High-Level Peer Group. He is presently working on case-based reasoning, machine learning, and AI applications to music.

2014

Degree in Mathematics at the University of Pisa and Diploma of Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, in 1968. From 1970 till 1981 researcher at IEI (now ISTI) of CNR, Pisa. In the seventies, she worked at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Stanford University, directed by J. McCarthy.
Full Professor since 1981. From 1982 she is at DIS, Sapienza University of Roma. From 1991 she is a professor of Artificial Intelligence. She has been chair of the Doctoral Program in "Ingegneria Informatica", and chair of the curriculum in "Ingegneria Informatica". Since 2006 she is the director of DIS.

Founder and first president of AI*IA, the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. Program chair for ECAI'90 and KRR'96, trustee of IJCAI from 1995 to 2005, conference chair of IJCAI'99, president of FoLLI in 2004-2005; in 2002-2003 she has been director of ITC-irst in Trento. She has coordinated several national programs, projects, working groups, and networks of excellence of the European Union. Expert in evaluation and review committees, and member of several editorial boards.
In the seventies, she worked in automated deduction and the construction of interactive proof checkers, with applications to program verification. At DIS she founded a research group in Artificial Intelligence, she has done research in knowledge representation and automated reasoning. In particular, she investigated the possibilities offered by an explicit representation of metaknowledge to increase the efficiency of deduction, the expressive power of a system, to provide it with introspection, and to allow for reasoning about knowledge and reasoning in multi-agent scenarios. She has investigated on the potential of some modal logics for representing autoepistemic reasoning and for dealing with incomplete (default) knowledge. She applied AI techniques for the construction of intelligent systems and systems that support human learning; she has done research in cognitive robotics and the application of planning techniques to security.

2012