Professor Anthony Cohn wins the 2015 Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award
Congratulations to Professor Anthony Cohn in the School of Computing who has been awarded the 2015 Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award by the Trustees of IJCAI.
He will collect the Award at the 24th IJCAI conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina in July 2015.
The IJCAI Distinguished Service Award was established in 1979 to "honor senior scientists in AI for contributions and service to the field during their careers".
Tony Cohn holds a Personal Chair at the University of Leeds, where he is Professor of Automated Reasoning. His research interests have always centred on knowledge representation and the control of reasoning. His early research concentrated on many sorted logics. Since the late 1980s he has been particularly interested in spatio-temporal representation and reasoning. This work includes developing qualitative spatial and spatio-temporal calculi, but also in applications of such calculi across a wide range of domains include Geographical Information Science, Cognitive Vision, Robotics, and Neuroscience.
He has a long history of service contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence, starting with the organisation of the UK AISB-85 conference, and has been President of the UK, European and two international AI societies: IJCAI and KR inc. (the organisation behind the biennial Knowledge Representation and Reasoning conferences). He has just finished an eight year term as co-Editor-in-Chief of the premier journal Artificial Intelligence, where he not only helped set up a sponsorship scheme which now distributes more than $250k p.a to the international AI community, but also negotiated an open access mechanism whereby anyone can get an account of Elsevier's Science Direct for free to view articles without charge. This is his second Distinguished Service Award, having already received one in 2012 from the US-based AAAI association.
