. Biography of Sven Koenig
Always keep in mind...
"The ablest man I ever met is the man you think you are."
(Franklin D. Roosevelt)
Sven Koenig is a professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University for his dissertation on "Goal-Directed Acting with Incomplete Information." He also holds M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University and is the recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service Award, an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, a Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award, a Mellon Mentoring Award, an SAIC Advisement Award, a Fulbright Fellowship and the Tong Leong Lim Pre-Doctoral Prize from the University of California at Berkeley. Several of his students won awards as well (including best paper, best dissertation, best research assistant and best teaching assistant awards) and took their first jobs in academia. Sven is also a program director at the National Science Foundation since 2010, where he received the Director's Award for Collaborative Integration in 2011.
Sven is interested in intelligent systems that have to operate in large, nondeterministic, nonstationary or only partially known domains. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. He believes that finding good solutions to these problems requires approaches that cut across many different fields and, consequently, his research draws on areas such as artificial intelligence, decision theory, and operations research. Applications of his research include planetary exploration, supply-chain management, medicine, crisis management (such as oil-spill containment), robotics and real-time games (entertainment, serious games, training and simulation).
Sven has edited several conference proceedings and published more than 150 papers in various areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, including around 25 papers at AAAI and IJCAI (the two main artificial intelligence conferences), as well as papers in planning (ICAPS and its predecessors AIPS and ECP), agents (AAMAS and its predecessor Autonomous Agents), machine learning (ICML, COLT), numerical artificial intelligence and control (NIPS, UAI, AI and Mathematics), knowledge representation and reasoning (KR), robotics (ICRA, IROS, RSS), and others. He was conference co-chair of the 2002 Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA), conference co-chair of the 2004 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), program co-chair of the 2005 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS), and program co-chair of the 2007 and 2008 AAAI Nectar programs. He is an editor of AI Magazine, an associate editor of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Journal on Advances in Complex Systems (ACS) and Computational Intelligence, a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), a member of the steering committee of SARA, a former associate editor of JAIR and a former member of the advisory committee of Americas School on Agents and Multiagent Systems and the executive committee of ICAPS. He co-founded Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), a highly selective robotics conference, in 2005, served on the board of directors of the Robotics: Science and Systems Foundation and now serves on its advisory board. He also co-founded the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), the first regular meeting of the search community in artificial intelligence, in 2009 and now serves on its governing council.
Sven is passionate about helping students and young researchers to get a good start in their careers. On the high-school level, he repeatedly represented the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) as a judge at ISEF, which brings together over 1,400 high-school students from more than forty nations. On the university level, he often serves as external member on dissertation committees, was three times co-chair of the AAAI student abstract and poster program, often participates as panelist or mentor in doctoral consortia of artificial intelligence conferences, is a member of award committees of major artificial intelligence conferences and journals, and frequently presents tutorials about his research at summer schools and conferences. He co-organized the first to tenth USC Programming Contests from 2005 to 2009 and trained USC students for the Regional ACM Programming Competitions, where they placed 2nd out of 73 teams in 2006.
In his spare time, Sven used to care for more than fifty newts from all over the world. He is also
a member of the Academy of Magical Arts at the Magic Castle in
Hollywood, but has not yet managed to make all (or even some) of his work
disappear. His Erdös
number is two .
Short Biographies of Sven Koenig
Here are two biographies that can be used for announcing talks.
Biography 1
Sven Koenig is a professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. Additional information about Sven can be found on his webpages: idm-lab.org.
Biography 2
Sven Koenig is a professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed. He is the recipient of an ACM Recognition of Service Award, an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Partnership Award, a Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award, a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award, a Mellon Mentoring Award and an SAIC Advisement Award. He co-founded Robotics: Science and Systems and the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), was conference co-chair of the 2002 Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, conference co-chair of the 2004 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, program co-chair of the 2005 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and program co-chair of the 2007 and 2008 AAAI Nectar programs. Additional information about Sven can be found on his webpages: idm-lab.org.
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