Bart Selman is a Dutch-American professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. He has previously worked at

AT&T Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

. He is also co-founder and principal investigator of the

Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) is a research center at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) focusing on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) safety methods. CHAI was founded in 2016 by a group of aca ...

(CHAI) at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, led by Berkeley

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

(AI) expert

Stuart J. Russell Stuart Jonathan Russell (born 1962) is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct ...

, and co-chair of the Computing Community Consortium's 20-year roadmap for AI research.

Education and career

Selman attended the Technical University of Delft, from where he received a master's degree in physics, graduating in 1983. He received his master's and PhD in computer science from the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

in 1985 and 1991 respectively.

Research

Selman's research focuses on the increasing and changing role of machines and computing in society. His studies at Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) focus on the potential risks and negative impacts of advanced AI. An expert in AI Safety, he studies how computing has shifted from

ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...

-neutral software to

predictive A prediction (Latin ''præ-'', "before," and ''dicere'', "to say"), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge. There is no universal agreement about the exact ...

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...

s and advocates integrating ethics and AI. He has authored over 90 publications, which have appeared in journals including ''

Nature Nature, in the broadest sense, is the physics, physical world or universe. "Nature" can refer to the phenomenon, phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The study of nature is a large, if not the only, part of science. ...

'', ''

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

'', and ''Proceedings of the National'' ''Academy of Sciences''. He has presented at several conferences in the fields of

and

. His research concepts include tractable inference,

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

, stochastic search methods, theory approximation,

knowledge compilation Knowledge compilation is a family of approaches for addressing the intractability of a number of artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by ma ...

, planning,

default reasoning Default logic is a non-monotonic logic proposed by Raymond Reiter to formalize reasoning with default assumptions. Default logic can express facts like “by default, something is true”; by contrast, standard logic can only express that somethin ...

satisfiability In mathematical logic, a formula is ''satisfiable'' if it is true under some assignment of values to its variables. For example, the formula x+3=y is satisfiable because it is true when x=3 and y=6, while the formula x+1=x is not satisfiable over ...

solvers like

WalkSAT In computer science, GSAT and WalkSAT are local search algorithms to solve Boolean satisfiability problems. Both algorithms work on formulae in Boolean logic that are in, or have been converted into conjunctive normal form. They start by assigni ...

, and connections between computer science and

statistical physics Statistical physics is a branch of physics that evolved from a foundation of statistical mechanics, which uses methods of probability theory and statistics, and particularly the Mathematics, mathematical tools for dealing with large populations ...

, namely

phase transition In chemistry, thermodynamics, and other related fields, a phase transition (or phase change) is the physical process of transition between one state of a medium and another. Commonly the term is used to refer to changes among the basic states of ...

phenomena.

Honors and awards

Selman has received five Best Paper Awards for his work, including the Cornell Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell Outstanding Educator Award, a

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the

American Association for Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

, the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

, and the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. He sits on the advisory board for the

DARPA Grand Challenge The DARPA Grand Challenge is a prize competition for American autonomous vehicles, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the most prominent research organization of the United States Department of Defense. Congress has authorize ...

Cornell Team.

Partial list of Selman's papers

* ''Statistical Regimes Across Considerateness Regions'', Carla P. Gomes, Cesar Fernandez, Bart Selman, and Christian Bessiere. Proc. 10th Intl. Conf. on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-04), Toronto, Ont., 2004. Distinguished Paper Award. * ''Towards Efficient Sampling: Exploiting Random Walk Strategies'', Wei Wei, Jordan Erenrich, and Bart Selman. Proc. AAAI-04. San Jose, CA, 2004. * ''Tracking evolving communities in large linked networks'', John Hopcroft, Brian Kulis, Omar Khan, and Bart Selman. Proc. Natl. Acad. of Sci. (PNAS), Febr., 2004. * ''Natural communities in large linked networks'',

John Hopcroft John Edward Hopcroft (born October 7, 1939) is an American theoretical computer scientist. His textbooks on theory of computation (also known as the Cinderella book) and data structures are regarded as standards in their fields. He is the IBM P ...

, Brian Kulis, Omar Khan, and Bart Selman. Proc. KDD, August 2003. * ''Backdoor To Typical Case Complexity'', Ryan Williams, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman. Proc. IJCAI-03 Acapulco, Mexico, 2003. * ''Communication and computation in distributed CSP algorithms'', Cesar Fernandez, Ramon Bejar, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Carla Gomes, and Bart Selman. In Distributed Sensor Networks, A Multi-agent Perspective. V. Lesser, C.L. Ortiz Jr., and M. Tambe (Eds.) Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003. * ''A principled study of the design tradeoffs for autonomous trading agents'', Ioannis A. Vetsikas and Bart Selman. Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, Melbourne, 2003. Describes ''Whitebear'' trading agent, winner of the Trading Agent competition 2002 (TAC-02). * ''Satisfied with Physics'', Gomes, Carla, and Selman, Bart. Science, Vol. 297, Aug. 2, 2002, 784–785. (Perspectives article.) Accompanying Mezard, Parisi, and Zecchina. * ''Accelerating Random Walks'', Wei, Wei and Selman, Bart. Proceedings of 8th Intl. Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-2002), 2002. * ''Dynamic Restart Policies'', Kautz, Henry, Horvitz, Eric, Ruan, Yongshao, Gomes, Carla, and Selman, Bart. Proceedings of the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-02) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 2002, 674–682.

References

External links

Selman's website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Selman, Bart Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists Cornell University faculty Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence researchers Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Scientists at Bell Labs Dutch computer scientists Delft University of Technology alumni University of Toronto alumni Sloan Research Fellows