International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Honors SRI's Raymond Perrault with Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award

MENLO PARK, Calif., July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In recognition for his substantial contributions and extensive service to the field of artificial intelligence, C. Raymond Perrault, Ph.D., director of SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center, was presented with the Donald E. Walker Distinguished Service Award today by the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) at its 2011 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

The award is named in honor of Donald Walker, who built the natural language group at SRI in the 1970s and developed it into one of the world's premier research groups. He was a leader of early speech and language projects at SRI and was heavily involved in the creation and management of several important organizations in artificial intelligence and natural language research, including the Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI -- formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence), IJCAI and COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics).

IJCAI is the premier international gathering of artificial intelligence researchers and practitioners. Held biennially in odd-numbered years since 1969, IJCAI is sponsored jointly by IJCAI and national AI societies of host nations.

Dr. Perrault has been president of IJCAI and the Association for Computational Linguistics and served as co-editor of the journal Artificial Intelligence. He currently leads SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center (AIC), which creates new technology with applications to bioinformatics, persistence surveillance, virtual personal assistants, and robotics.  

Dr. Perrault has served as co-principal investigator of SRI's DARPA-funded CALO Project, a large, multi-institutional project whose objective was to develop an enduring personalized cognitive assistant. Several technologies developed on that project are now being transitioned to commercial and military applications.

Before coming to SRI, Dr. Perrault was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he created the first applications of planning, plan recognition, and speech act theory to problems in natural language discourse.  He was also founding principal of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.

About SRI International

Silicon Valley-based SRI International, a nonprofit research and development organization, performs sponsored R&D for governments, businesses, and foundations. SRI brings its innovations to the marketplace through technology licensing, new products, and spin-off ventures. Commemorating its 65th anniversary in 2011, SRI is known for world-changing innovations in computing, health and pharmaceuticals, chemistry and materials, sensing, energy, education, national defense, and more.

SOURCE SRI International

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