U-M professors Satinder Singh Baveja and John Laird received awards recognizing their contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science to be presented at conferences in August.

Read more about their awards below.

 

Satinder Singh Baveja
2019 Classic Paper Award

A paper co-authored by Toyota Professor of Artificial Intelligence Satinder Singh Baveja has been recognized for its lasting impact on the field of reinforcement learning. First published in 1999, “Between MDPs and semi-MDPs: A framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning” has been selected for the 2019 Classic Paper Award by the Artificial Intelligence Journal. The award will be conferred at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in August.

Read the full U-M article:
Paper Recognized for Lasting Contributions to AI Decision Making

 

John Laird
Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems

John Laird, the John L. Tishman Professor of Engineering, was awarded the 2018 Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems along with his collaborator Prof. Paul Rosenbloom of the University of Southern California. Professors Laird and Rosenbloom were invited to give their prize address at the Seventh Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems, which took place August 2-5, 2019, at MIT.

The award recognizes the pair’s research on cognitive architectures, especially their Soar project, their applications to knowledge-based systems and models of human cognition, and their contributions to theories of representation, reasoning, problem solving, and learning.

According to the awarding committee, the recipients have been “energetic contributors to AI and cognitive science” for over 30 years. Laird’s and Rosenbloom’s interdisciplinary and integrative research, both jointly and individually, has addressed many facets of high-level cognition, and their contributions to Soar have helped create one of the industry’s most successful tools for developing intelligent systems.

Read the full U-M article:
Recognizing a Lifetime of Achievement in Cognitive Systems