Nils John Nilsson | |
|---|---|
 Nilsson in 2013 | |
| Born | (1933-02-06)February 6, 1933 |
| Died | April 23, 2019(2019-04-23) (aged 86) |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence |
| Institutions | SRI International Stanford University |
| Thesis | An Application of the Theory of Games to Radar Reception Problems[1] (1958) |
| Doctoral advisor | Willis Harman[1] |
| Doctoral students | Leslie P. Kaelbling[1] |
Nils John Nilsson (February 6, 1933 – April 23, 2019) was anAmerican computer scientist. He was one of the founding researchers in the discipline ofartificial intelligence.[2] He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering incomputer science atStanford University from 1991 until his retirement. He is particularly known for his contributions tosearch,planning,knowledge representation, androbotics.[2]
Nilsson was born inSaginaw,Michigan, in 1933.[2] He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1958, and spent much of his career atSRI International, a private research lab spun off from Stanford.[2][3]
Nilsson served as alieutenant in theU.S. Air Force from 1958 to 1961; he was stationed at theRome Air Development Center inRome,New York.[2][3]
Starting in 1966, Nilsson, along withCharles A. Rosen andBertram Raphael, led a research team in the construction ofShakey, a robot that constructed a model of its environment from sensor data, reasoned about that environment to arrive at a plan of action, then carried that plan out by sending commands to its motors.[2][3] This paradigm has been enormously influential in AI.[2][3] Textbooks such asIntroduction to Artificial Intelligence,[4]Essentials of Artificial Intelligence,[5] and the first edition ofArtificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[6] show this influence in almost every chapter.[2][3] Although the basic idea of using logical reasoning to decide on actions is due to John McCarthy,[7] Nilsson's group was the first to embody it in a complete agent, along the way inventing theA* search algorithm[8] and founding the field ofautomated temporal planning.[2][3] In the latter pursuit, they invented theSTRIPS planner,[9] whose action representation is still the basis of many of today's planning algorithms. The subfield of automated temporal planning calledclassical planning is based on most of the assumptions built into STRIPS.[2][3]
In 1985, Nilsson became a faculty member atStanford University, in the Computer Science Department.[3] He was chair of the department from 1985 to 1990.[3] He was the Kumagai Professor of Engineering from the foundation of the Chair in around 1991[10] until his retirement, and remained Kumagai Professor Emeritus until his death.[3]
He was the fourth President of theAAAI (1982–83) and a Founding Fellow of that organization.[3] Nilsson wrote or coauthored several books on AI, including two that have been especially widely read—Principles of Artificial Intelligence (1982) andLogical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (1987).[2][3]
In 2011, Nilsson was inducted intoIEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".[citation needed]
On July 19, 1958, Nilsson married Karen Braucht, with whom he had two children.[2][3] Braucht died in 1991.[2] In 1992 he married Grace Abbott, who had four children from a previous marriage.[2]
Nilsson died on April 23, 2019, at his home inMedford,Oregon, at the age of 86.[2][3]
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