Drew McDermott (December 27, 1949 – May 26, 2022) was a 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 practical disciplines (includi ...

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

. He was known for his contributions in artificial intelligence and planning.

Education

Drew McDermott earned

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

M.S. A Master of Science ( la, Magisterii Scientiae; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree in the field of science awarded by universities in many countries or a person holding such a degree. In contrast to ...

, and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

degrees from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT). He became a tenured full professor at Yale in 1983. He served as Chair of the Department from 1991 to 1995. He retired in 2018.

Research

His research has been in the area of

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 r ...

, with side excursions into philosophy. His Ph.D. dissertation was in the area of

automated planning Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

. In that work, he coined the term "task network" to refer to hierarchies of abstract and concrete actions and policies. He did seminal work in

Non-monotonic logic A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose conclusion relation is not monotonic. In other words, non-monotonic logics are devised to capture and represent defeasible inferences (cf. defeasible reasoning), i.e., a kind of inference in which re ...

in the early 1980s, and was an advocate for the "logicist" methodology in AI, defined as formalizing knowledge and reasoning in terms of deduction and quasideduction. In 1987 he published a paper criticizing the logicist approach. The critique was based partly on a previous paper (with Steve Hanks) pointing out a flaw with all known approaches to nonmonotonic temporal reasoning, embodied in what is now called the Yale shooting problem.

Artificial intelligence

Although new approaches have since been found, McDermott turned to other areas of AI, such as

vision Vision, Visions, or The Vision may refer to: Perception Optical perception * Visual perception, the sense of sight * Visual system, the physical mechanism of eyesight * Computer vision, a field dealing with how computers can be made to gain und ...

and

robotics Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of computer science and engineering. Robotics involves design, construction, operation, and use of robots. The goal of robotics is to design machines that can help and assist humans. Robotics integrate ...

, and began working on

again. His work on planning focused on the "classical" case rather than on hierarchical task network planning. In 1990 he was named a Fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of 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 ...

, one of the first group of Fellows. In 1996 he (and Hector Geffner and Blai Bonet independently) discovered "estimated-regression planning", based on the idea of heuristic search with an estimator derived from a simplified domain model by reasoning backward ("regression") from the goal. The simplified version is obtained automatically from a full domain model by ignoring propositions deleted by actions. In 2000 he got interested in logic again because the development of the semantic web made it seem newly applicable. He did work on ontology translation and on semantic web services.

ICAPS

McDermott was a prime mover, with

James Hendler James Alexander Hendler (born April 2, 1957) is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administr ...

and others, behind the AI Planning Systems Conference, which, after merging with the European Conference on Planning, became the annual International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). He also helped start the International Planning Competition, which is held semiannually in conjunction with ICAPS. He led the group that molded the Planning Domain Definition Language from several predecessor notations in order to provide a standard notation for input to planning systems. A sidelight of his work has been an interest in the philosophy of mind, stemming from his realization as a child that "electronic brains" do not have a "part that thinks", and that therefore biological brains probably don't either. This interest culminated in the publication in 2001 of a book on computational models of consciousness.

Personal life

McDermott was married in 1975, divorced in 1997, and remarried the same year. He has two children from his first marriage. He and his second wife, Judy Nugent, lived in New Haven, CT since 1999.

References

Eugene Charniak Eugene Charniak is a professor of computer Science and cognitive Science at Brown University. He holds an A.B. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. His research has always been in the area of l ...

, Christopher Riesbeck, and Drew McDermott (1980) ''Artificial Intelligence Programming''. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. *

and Drew McDermott (1985) ''Introduction to Artificial Intelligence''. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. * Steven Hanks and Drew McDermott (1987) Nonmonotonic logic and temporal projection. ''Artificial Intelligence'' 33, no.3, pp. 379–412 * Drew McDermott (1987) A critique of pure reason. ''Computational Intelligence'' 3(33), pp. 151–160. * Drew McDermott (1996) A Heuristic Estimator for Means-Ends Analysis in Planning. In ''Proc. International Conference on AI Planning Systems'' 3, pp. 142–149 * Drew McDermott (ed.) 1998 ''The Planning Domain Definition Language Manual''. Yale Computer Science Report 1165 (CVC Report 98-003). Available at tp://ftp.cs.yale.edu/pub/mcdermott/software/pddl.tar.gz Yale ftp site * Drew McDermott (1999) Using Regression-Match Graphs to Control Search in Planning. ''Artificial Intelligence'' 109(1–2), pp. 111–159 * Drew McDermott (2001) ''Mind and Mechanism''. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

External links

Drew McDermott's homepage at Yale University
{{DEFAULTSORT:McDermott, Drew Artificial intelligence researchers American computer scientists 1949 births 2022 deaths Yale University faculty Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni