Nils John Nilsson

Nils John Nilsson
Nilsson in 2017
Born	(1933-02-06)February 6, 1933 Saginaw, Michigan, U.S.
Died	April 23, 2019(2019-04-23) (aged 86) Medford, Oregon, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Stanford University
Scientific career
Fields	Artificial intelligence
Institutions	SRI International Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Willis Harman
Doctoral students	Leslie P. Kaelbling

Nils John Nilsson (February 6, 1933 – April 23, 2019) was an American computer scientist. He was one of the founding researchers in the discipline of artificial intelligence. He was the first Kumagai Professor of Engineering in computer science at Stanford University from 1991 until his retirement. He is particularly known for his contributions to search, planning, knowledge representation, and robotics.

Shakey at the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California

Early life and education

Nilsson was born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1933. He 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.

Nilsson served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force from 1958 to 1961; he was stationed at the Rome Air Development Center in Rome, New York.

Career

SRI International

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 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.

Stanford University

In 1985, Nilsson became a faculty member at Stanford University, in the Computer Science Department. He was chair of the department from 1985 to 1990. He was the Kumagai Professor of Engineering from the foundation of the Chair in around 1991 until his retirement, and remained Kumagai Professor Emeritus until his death.

He was the fourth President of the AAAI (1982–83) and a Founding Fellow of that organization. Nilsson wrote or coauthored several books on AI, including two that have been especially widely read (Nilsson 1980, Genesereth & Nilsson 1987).

Awards and memberships

In 2011, Nilsson was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems".

Personal life

On July 19, 1958, Nilsson married Karen Braucht, with whom he had two children. Braucht died in 1991. In 1992 he married Grace Abbott, who had four children from a previous marriage.

Nilsson died on April 23, 2019, at his home in Medford, Oregon, at the age of 86.

Selected publications

• Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (1976), Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-493-30598-8. (with Michael Genesereth)
• Principles of Artificial Intelligence (1982), Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-540-11340-9.
• The Mathematical Foundations of Learning Machines (1990), Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-558-60123-9.
• Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (1998), Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-558-60467-4.
• The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (2009), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-11639-8.
• Understanding Beliefs (2014), MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-52643-2.

Further reading

• Charniak, Eugene; McDermott, Drew (1985), Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

• Fikes, Richard; Nilsson, Nils (1971), "STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving", Artificial Intelligence, 2 (3–4): 189–208, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.78.8292, doi:10.1016/0004-3702(71)90010-5
• Ginsberg, Matthew (1993), Essentials of Artificial Intelligence, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.

• Hart, P. E.; Nilsson, N. J.; Raphael, B. (1968), "A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths" (PDF), IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics SSC4, 4 (2): 100–107, doi:10.1109/TSSC.1968.300136

• McCarthy, John (1968) [1960], M. Minsky (ed.), "Programs with common sense", Proceedings of the Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, pp. 403–418
• Russell, Stuart; Norvig, Peter (1992), Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (1st ed.), Prentice Hall

External links

• Nilsson's home page
• Nils John Nilsson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Nils J. Nilsson at the AI Genealogy Project.
• Oral history interview with Nils J. Nilsson, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Nilsson gives an overview of DARPA-sponsored AI research at SRI, including his own work in robotics (especially during the period 1966-1971), research on the Computer Based Consultant, and related research on natural language and speech understanding. He describes the significance and relationship of robotics to the larger field of AI, particularly the intellectual problems it addressed and the enabling technologies it helped develop.