Nils Nilsson (researcher)
| Nils John Nilsson | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 1933 (age 83–84) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Artificial intelligence |
| Institutions |
SRI International Stanford University |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Doctoral advisor | Willis Harman |
| Doctoral students |
Leslie P. Kaelbling Andrew Kosoresow Karen Myers |
Nils John Nilsson (born 1933) is an American computer scientist. He is one of the founding researchers in the discipline of artificial intelligence. He is the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in Computer Science at Stanford University, position that he held since the chair was established in 1990 through 1995. He is particularly famous for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics.
His research has been based mainly on the premise that intelligence is based on knowledge that must be represented explicitly.
Nilsson received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1958, and spent much of his career at SRI International, a private research lab spun off from Stanford.
Starting in 1966, Nilsson, along with Charles A. Rosen and Bertram Raphael, led a research team in the construction of Shakey, 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. This paradigm has been enormously influential in AI. (Textbooks such as (Charniak & McDermott 1985), (Ginsberg 1993) and the first edition of (Russell & Norvig 1992) show this influence in almost every chapter, although the entire field has not always stayed under its spell.) Although the basic idea of using logical reasoning to decide on actions is due to John McCarthy (McCarthy), Nilsson's group was the first to embody it in a complete agent, along the way inventing the A* search algorithm (Hart, Nilsson & Raphael 1968) and founding the field of automated temporal planning. In the latter pursuit, they invented the STRIPS planner (Fikes & Nilsson 1971), whose action representation is still the basis of many of today's planning algorithms. The subfield of automated temporal planning called classical planning is based on most of the assumptions built into STRIPS.
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