David A. McAllester

This article is about the computer scientist. For the ethnomusicologist, see David P. McAllester.
David A. McAllester
Born (1956-05-30) May 30, 1956 (age 68)
United States
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forArtificial intelligence
AwardsAAAI Classic Paper Award (2010)[1]
International Conference on Logic Programming Test of Time award (2014)[2]
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
InstitutionsMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
Doctoral advisorGerald Sussman

David A. McAllester (born May 30, 1956) is an American computer scientist who is Professor and former chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, 1979 and 1987 respectively. His PhD was supervised by Gerald Sussman. He was on the faculty of Cornell University for the academic year 1987–1988 and on the faculty of MIT from 1988 to 1995. He was a member of technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research from 1995 to 2002. He has been a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence since 1997.[3] He has written over 100 refereed publications.

McAllester's research areas include machine learning theory, the theory of programming languages, automated reasoning, AI planning, computer game playing (computer chess) and computational linguistics. A 1991 paper on AI planning[4] proved to be one of the most influential papers of the decade in that area.[5] A 1993 paper on computer game algorithms[6] influenced the design of the algorithms used in the Deep Blue chess system that defeated Garry Kasparov.[7] A 1998 paper on machine learning theory[8] introduced PAC-Bayesian theorems which combine Bayesian and non-Bayesian methods.

  1. ^ "AAAI Classic Paper Award". AAAI. 2016. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
  2. ^ "Pascal's paper stands the test of time". Australian National University. 23 April 2014. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
  3. ^ "David McAllester biography". Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
  4. ^ McAllester, David; Rosenblitt, David (December 1991). "Systematic Nonlinear Planning" (PDF). Proceedings AAAI-91. AAAI: 634–639. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
  5. ^ "Google Scholar Citations". Google Scholar. 2016. Retrieved 19 August 2016.
  6. ^ McAllester, David; Yuret, Deniz (20 October 1993). "Alpha-Beta-Conspiracy Search". ICGA Journal. Draft. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.44.6969.
  7. ^ Campbell, Murray S.; Joseph Hoane, Jr., A.; Hsu, Feng-hsiung (1999). "Search Control Methods in Deep Blue" (PDF). AAAI Technical Report SS-99-07. AAAI: 19–23. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 September 2016. Retrieved 16 August 2016. To the best of our knowledge, the idea of separating the white and black depth computation was first suggested by David McAllester. A later paper (McAllester and Yuret 1993) derived an algorithm, ABC, from conspiracy theory (McAllester 1988).
  8. ^ McAllester, David (1998). "Some PAC-Bayesian theorems". Proceedings of the eleventh annual conference on Computational learning theory - COLT' 98. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 230–234. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.21.1745. doi:10.1145/279943.279989. ISBN 978-1581130577. S2CID 53234792. Retrieved 19 August 2016.