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 Association for the Advancement of 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. In August, 2011 he was inducted as one of ten members of IEEE Intelligent System's inaugural "AI Hall of Fame."
A Recent Book
My latest book, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements, is available from Cambridge University Press and from bookstores such as Amazon.com. (Click here to see a brief description and some reviewers comments.) The book is written both for the lay reader who would like to know what this field is all about and for the researcher, student, and scholar interested in the historical antecedents of current AI systems.
Book in Progress
I am working on a new book about how and why we believe things. People who would like to see how the book is coming along, can visit BELIEFS (DRAFT).
Contact info
I have relocated to Medford, Oregon but can still be reached
by email at: 
As an emeritus faculty member, I am no longer accepting PhD students, research assistants, or postdoctoral researchers.