Nils J. Nilsson
Kumagai Professor of Engineering, Emeritus
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Department of Computer Science
Office: Room
135,
Current Interests
Artificial Intelligence. I am interested in keeping track of progress toward human-level AI.
Philosophy. I have written a book dealing with how we "know" things. It is in the form of a conversation between a robot and three humans. To download the book or its individual chapters, click on How Are We To Know? I would be interested in comments and criticisms.
The Quest for Artificial Intelligence. I am writing a book on the history of AI. I hope to finish by the end of 2008.
As an emeritus professor, I am no longer accepting PhD students, research assistants, or postdoctoral researchers. I am available for informal advising of undergraduate, Masters, and PhD students.
Publications And Other Writings
Biographical Sketch
Nils J. Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, received his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1958. He spent twenty-three years at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International working on statistical and neural-network approaches to pattern recognition, co-inventing the A* heuristic search algorithm and the STRIPS automatic planning system, directing work on the integrated mobile robot, SHAKEY, and collaborating in the development of the PROSPECTOR expert system. He has published five textbooks on artificial intelligence.
Professor Nilsson returned to Stanford in 1985 as the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, a position he held until August 1990. Besides teaching courses on artificial intelligence and on machine learning, he has conducted research on flexible robots that are able to react to dynamic worlds, plan courses of action, and learn from experience. Professor Nilsson served on the editorial boards of the journal Artificial Intelligence and of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was an Area Editor for the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a past-president and Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a co-founder of Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.
Professor Nilsson is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is a recipient of the IEEE "Neural-Network Pioneer" award, the IJCAI "Research Excellence" award, and the AAAI "Distinguished Service" award.