Subbarao Kambhampati(PhD ’89) named President Elect of AAAI

An alumnus of our Computer Science Department and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Arizona State University, Subbarao ‘Rao’ Kambhampati (PhD ’89) has been named President Elect of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence).  He will serve as the president of the organization from 2016-18. In addition to Kambhampati’s many accomplishments, he has written a paper with Professor Dana Nau, who has recently been named a fellow of the AAAI.

However, in fall of 1984, Rao Kambhampati was a graduate student bent on finding a clever way to earn a place in Emeritus Professor Jack Minker’s oversubscribed graduate course in Artificial Intelligence.  Kambhampati won the spot after answering a trivia question. After taking that course, and many others, Kambhampati learned a PhD in Computer Science in 1989 under the direction of Jim Hendler.  Dr. Minker noted that he remembered Kambhampati as a member of his graduate seminar in the early 1980s.  In an email to the department, Minker writes: “Rao is an outstanding researcher in AI and a very nice person… [he] brings credit to our AI group, our CS department and our university.”

From the AAAI website: Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines.