Dr. James A. Hendler

The IEEE Intelligent Systems article Introducing the Future of AI began with

As you no doubt know by now, 2006 is the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth summer workshop that was, if not the birth of modern AI, then certainly the party celebrating that birth. Of course, machine intelligence workshops had already taken place in the US and UK, and Alan Turing had proposed his famous “imitation game”, now called the Turing Test, in a 1950 paper. However, the 1956 summer school brought together the field’s leading researchers, along with a small number of bright students interested in learning more about this newly emerging “artificial intelligence” thing.
 
As editor in chief, I was initially tempted to create a volume, as several other AI magazines and journals have, that would look back at 50 years of AI and ruminate on where we’ve been. However, the more I thought about this issue and the stories I’d heard of the field’s early days, the more I started thinking about how exciting it must have been before anyone had talked of “AI winter” or, as one AAAI Spring Symposium was so foolishly titled, “What Went Wrong and Why?” Rather, the field focused on an exciting journey into a bright, unknown future. Working with primitive computers now surpassed by a microwave oven’s microprocessor, these daring scientists dreamed of solving one of the most enduring scientific problems: What is intelligence, and what might it mean that we have it?

Dr. James A. Hendler, FAAAI is one of the inventors of the Semantic Web and the Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems. Read his special on the future of AI, where he invited well-known AI scientists to contribute articles speculating about where AI is headed and how we might get there!
 
Jim is also a Professor at the University of Maryland and the Director of Semantic Web and Agent Technology at the Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Laboratory. He has joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and is an affiliate of the Institute for Systems Research.
 
He was the recipient of a 1995 Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, is a former member of the US Air Force Science Advisory Board, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is also the former Chief Scientist of the Information Systems Office at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was awarded a US Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 2002, and is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Coordination Group. He is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science.
 
Jim has authored close to 200 technical papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, Semantic Web, agent-based computing, and high performance processing. He authored Integrating Marker-Passing and Problem Solving: A Spreading Activation Approach to Improved Choice in Planning and the innovative Amazon download Knowledge is power: a view from the Semantic Web. : An article from: AI Magazine, coauthored Robots for Kids: Exploring New Technologies for Learning, edited Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems : Proceedings of the First Conference (AIPS 92), and coedited Spinning the Semantic Web : Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential, Massively Parallel Artificial Intelligence, Readings in Planning, and The Semantic Web – ISWC 2002.
 
He earned a BS in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence from Yale University in 1978, a MS in Cognitive Psychology, Human Factors Engineering from Southern Methodist University in 1982, a ScM in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence from Brown University in 1983, and a PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence from Brown University in 1986. He was a Visiting Professor at Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel in 1994 and a Visiting Professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel during 1995–1996.
 
Read the transcript of his CNN interview. Read Jim’s Blog! See Jim scuba diving.