Drew McDermott

Drew McDermott is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. He was born in 1949, and lived in the Midwestern United States (mainly Indiana), for four years, and in Brazil (Minas Gerais).

In 1967 he went to MIT as an undergraduate. He left in 1976 with three degrees, B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.. He went to Yale University, where he has been ever since. He became a tenured full professor in 1983. He served as Chair of the Department from 1991 to 1995.

His research has been in the area of artificial intelligence, with side excursions into philosophy. His Ph.D. dissertation was in the area of automated planning. 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 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.

Although new approaches have since been found, McDermott turned to other areas of AI, such as vision and robotics, and began working on automated planning 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, 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.

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