CBSE NEWS

David Haussler to receive the 2003 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

David Haussler

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) have awarded David Haussler the Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions that have changed the scientific world beyond computer science and engineering. Haussler was cited as possibly the most influential contributor to the field of computational biology.

This year’s co-recipient, Judea Pearl, is professor of computer science and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA. Pearl has made seminal contributions to the field of artificial intelligence that extend to philosophy, psychology, medicine, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science.

As the recipients of the 2003 Allen Newell Award, Haussler and Pearl demonstrate the remarkable influence that computer science and artificial intelligence can have on other sciences, on practical tools, and on human thought.

The award will be presented at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 5, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. It comes with a cash prize of $10,000. The award was named for Allen Newell, a pioneer in artificial intelligence.

Haussler, a investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the CBSE at UCSC. By focusing on scientific interactions between computer scientists and molecular biologists, he has played a leading role in developing the new field of computational biology. His work laid the foundation for the modern probabilistic approach to detecting and analyzing the biological components of the human genome. His collaborations led to algorithms to assemble the first public working draft of the human genome and posting it on the World Wide Web. He also aided in developing interactive web-based browsers that analyzed and annotated genome sequences of human beings and other organisms. These web-based tools are used extensively in biomedical research.

Each recipient of this year’s award has made groundbreaking theoretical and methodological contributions that have been widely adopted and have changed the scientific world beyond computer science and engineering.

Haussler is being awarded for exceptional contributions bridging computer science and biology through research in computational learning theory, computational biology, and bioinformatics leading to major influences on the understanding of biological macromolecules and the investigation of the human genome.

Pearl is receiving the award for seminal contributions to artificial intelligence and, in turn, to its applications, by building a firm mathematical and theoretical foundation through ground-breaking work in heuristic search, reasoning under uncertainty, constraint processing, non-monotonic reasoning, and causal modeling.