David Waltz

David L. Waltz
Born	May 28, 1943 (1943-05-28) (age 68)
Residence	USA
Citizenship	USA
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Columbia university NEC Research Brandeis University Thinking Machines Corporation University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor	Patrick Winston
Influences	Marvin Minsky

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.

Biography

Waltz was born in New Jersey 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).

Awards

Waltz was elected a Fellow of AAAI in 1990 ^[1] and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1998.^[2] 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.

References

1. ^ Current AAAI Fellows
2. ^ David L. Waltz elected ACM Fellow

External links

• Homepage

Persondata
Name	Waltz, David
Alternative names
Short description	Computer Scientist
Date of birth	05 May 1943
Place of birth	New Jersey
Date of death
Place of death