Visiting Senior Research Scientist

Prof. Austin Tate holds the Chair in Knowledge-Based Systems at the University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at the University. He helped form AIAI in 1984 and since that time has led its efforts to transfer the technologies and methods of artificial intelligence and knowledge systems into commercial, governmental and academic applications throughout the world. He holds degrees in Computer Studies (B.A. Lancaster, 1972) , Machine Intelligence (Ph.D. Edinburgh, 1975) and e-Learning (M.Sc. Edinburgh, 2012). He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers (FREng), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE, Scotland’s National Academy), and is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence amongst other honors. He is a professionally Chartered Engineer.

Prof. Tate’s research interests are in the use of rich process and plan representations along with tools that can utilize these representations to support planning and activity management. He pioneered the early, now widely used and deployed, approaches to hierarchical planning and constraint satisfaction in the Interplan, Nonlin, O-Plan and I-Plan planning systems. His recent work on “I-X” is concerned with supporting collaboration between human and system agents to perform cooperative tasks in a “Helpful Environment”.

Prof. Tate was the Edinburgh PI in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration funded by EPSRC. He also led the DARPA funded Coalition Agent eXperiment (CoAX) project involving some 30 organizations in 4 countries over a 3 year period, and worked with IHMC in this effort. His joint work with IHMC addresses search and rescue and emergency response tasks. His internationally sponsored research work is focused on the use of advanced knowledge and planning technologies, and collaborative systems especially using virtual worlds. He leads the Virtual University of Edinburgh, Vue, a virtual educational and research institute bringing together those interested in the use of virtual worlds for teaching, research and outreach. Prof. Tate is on the Senior Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems journal and is a member of the editorial board of a number of other journals.