Perlis Receives AAAI Blue Sky Award for Innovative Work in Artificial Intelligence

Don Perlis, a professor of computer science with an appointment in UMIACS, was recently honored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for his ideas on advancing autonomous commonsense-reasoning by basing knowledge and understanding on a form of perceptual imagination.

The AAAI, in cooperation with the Computing Research Association Computing Community Consortium, presented Perlis with its Blue Sky Ideas award, which recognizes papers that present ideas and visions that stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains or new methodologies.

Perlis’s Five Dimensions of Reasoning in the Wild examined commonsense-reasoning in the context of artificial intelligence, noting: “ … AI will not approach human-level intelligence until we take far more seriously the real-world dynamic connection of agent and environment.”

In UMIACS, Perlis is developing robust and flexible autonomous systems that use a “commonsense-core hypothesis”—meaning that there is a modest number of general-purpose anomaly-handling strategies that humans use (and that machines can be programmed to use) which allow people to muddle through a multitude of daily situations for which they are not highly trained.

Perlis received the Blue Sky Award at the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), held Feb. 12–17 in Phoenix, Arizona.