About ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award

Henry Kautz was honored for contributions to artificial intelligence and computational social science, including fundamental results on the complexity of inference, planning and media analytics for public health.

Beginning with his doctoral dissertation, Kautz, now a professor at the University of Rochester, has studied how computers can infer the goals and plans of people by studying their behavior. He has made a range of fundamental contributions to theory and practice in knowledge representation and reasoning, planning and plan recognition and computational social science. Kautz was one of the pioneers in analyzing the computational complexity of knowledge representation formalisms. He was also a co-developer of the first randomized local search algorithms for Boolean satisfiability testing, which have found practical application in planning, graphical models, and software verification.

In the area of pervasive computing and social media analytics, his trailblazing projects have included a system to help cognitively disabled people find their way by inferring the transportation destinations of selected groups of people; a project that uncovered the central role of air travel in the spread of diseases by analyzing social media data; and an initiative to improve the efficiency of restaurant health inspections by combining social media reports of food poisoning with location data.

The ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. The Newell award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, provided by ACM and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and by individual contributions.