Awards and Honors

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, August 2021.

Early in my doctoral research, I was fortunate to have been able to collaborate with Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Michael L. Littman, two enormously talented researchers and fantastically nice people. This 1998 paper was the longer, journal version of our 1994 AAAI paper which was also recognized with the AAAI Classic Paper Award. Here is the PDF of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ) award certificate.

AIJ Site

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, July 2013.

Co-authored with Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Michael L. Littman, our paper titled "Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains" was presented at the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), Seattle, Washington, USA. Twenty years later, in 2013 we were awarded the Classic Paper Award for significant contributions to the application of POMDP models in AI and to practical algorithms for their solution.

AAAI Site

"System, Method and Apparatus for Providing Navigational Assistance", with Brian J. Stankiewicz, awarded November 17, 2009.

I had a somewhat short but very fruitful collaboration with Prof. Brian Stankiewicz while he was at the University of Texas at Austin. We worked on the problem of how to better assist people with low-vision in navigating unknown environments. This was the intersection of my thesis work on POMDP models and Prof. Stankiewicz's work using models of cognition. This patent and two published conference papers were the most visible outputs of this research effort.

Google Link

Stony Brook University, May 1992.

As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to have landed in the introductory CS course taught by Prof. Peter Henderson. I was able to get a comprehensive foundation in CS and was helped greatly by Prof. Henderson throughout my studies. This included involvement in a summer research project. This award was the culmination of my CS education at Stony Brook, for which I owe Prof. Henderson a lot of gratitude.

Stony Brook University, May 1992.

I was told that I was the first person at Stony Brook to receive the Award for Academic Excellence in two majors. For this I owe great thanks to Prof. Alan Tucker. He was an inspirational teacher and really sparked my interests in combinatorics and probability theory. Prof. Tucker is most directly responsible for my application to graduate school and my pursuit of a Ph.D.

Stony Brook University, May 1991.

This was an undergraduate award given at the end of the semester based upon your GPA.