David Waltz
Encyclopedia
David L. Waltz is computer scientist who has made significant contributions in several areas of Artificial Intelligence
,
including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He has held positions in academia and industry and is currently a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University
where he directs the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
in 1943. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
where he was part of the MIT AI Laboratory and received S.B. (1965), M.S. (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees, all in Electrical Engineering.
His Ph.D. dissertation on computer vision (“Generating Semantic Descriptions from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows”) initiated the field of constraint propagation
and with Craig Stanfill he originated the field of memory-based reasoning branch of case-based reasoning. His research interests have also included massively parallel information retrieval, data mining, learning and automatic classification with applications protein structure prediction, and natural language processing and machine learning applications applied to the electric power grid.
Waltz has been the Director of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University
since 2003. He was formerly President of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984-1993 was Director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University
. He had also been Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for 11 years.
Waltz served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 1997–1999 and is the former Chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). He is on the Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the board of the Computing Community Consortium
of the Computing Research Association
, and NSF
Computer Science Advisory Board.
He is currently on the Army Research Lab Technical Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the Technical Advisory Board of 4C (Cork Constraint Computation Center, Ireland) and has served on recent external advisory boards for Rutgers University
, Carnegie Mellon University
, Brown University
, and EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne).
in 1998. In 2011 he was selected as the recipient of the AAAI Distinguished Service Award for extraordinary and sustained service to the artificial intelligence community.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
,
including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He has held positions in academia and industry and is currently a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
where he directs the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Biography
Waltz was born in New JerseyNew Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
in 1943. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
where he was part of the MIT AI Laboratory and received S.B. (1965), M.S. (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees, all in Electrical Engineering.
His Ph.D. dissertation on computer vision (“Generating Semantic Descriptions from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows”) initiated the field of constraint propagation
Local consistency
In constraint satisfaction, local consistency conditions are properties of constraint satisfaction problems related to the consistency of subsets of variables or constraints. Several such conditions exist, the most known being node consistency, arc consistency, and path consistency...
and with Craig Stanfill he originated the field of memory-based reasoning branch of case-based reasoning. His research interests have also included massively parallel information retrieval, data mining, learning and automatic classification with applications protein structure prediction, and natural language processing and machine learning applications applied to the electric power grid.
Waltz has been the Director of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
since 2003. He was formerly President of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984-1993 was Director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University
Brandeis University
Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...
. He had also been Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for 11 years.
Waltz served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 1997–1999 and is the former Chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). He is on the Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the board of the Computing Community Consortium
Computing Community Consortium
The Computing Community Consortium is an organization whose goal is to catalyze and empower the U.S. computing research community to pursue audacious, high-impact research....
of the Computing Research Association
Computing Research Association
The Computing Research Association is an association of more than 220 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional...
, and NSF
NSF
-Politics:* National Service Framework, any of a series of British government policies on medical care* National Socialist Front, a Swedish Nazi party* NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party...
Computer Science Advisory Board.
He is currently on the Army Research Lab Technical Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the Technical Advisory Board of 4C (Cork Constraint Computation Center, Ireland) and has served on recent external advisory boards for Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
, Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
, Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, and EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne).
Awards
Waltz was elected a Fellow of AAAI in 1990 and a Fellow of the Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
in 1998. In 2011 he was selected as the recipient of the AAAI Distinguished Service Award for extraordinary and sustained service to the artificial intelligence community.
Selected Works
- Generating Semantic Description from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows, Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT, 1972.
- Understanding line drawings of scenes with shadows, in The Psychology of Computer Vision, P. H. Winston (Ed.), 1975
- Toward memory-based reasoning, (with C. Stanfill), Communications of the ACM, v29n12, pp. 1213–1228, 1986.
- Massively parallel parsing: A strongly interactive model of natural language interpretation, (with J. Pollack), Cognitive Science, v9n1, pp. 51–74, 1985.