ACM-Infosys award for Koller - by dreamdamodar
Infosys Technologies and ACM announced that Daphne Koller, a professor at Stanford University, has been awarded the first-ever ACM-Infosys foundation award in computing sciences. Koller, 39, is being recognized for her innovative approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows computers to reason and learn about the world from real-world data by combining the previously incompatible tools of logic and probability that are the basic principles of intelligent reasoning. She created a new field of learning that has transformed the way computers can process vast amounts of old verse, uncertain, often-conflicting data to solve complex real-world problems. This new award, announced in August 2007, recognizes personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Financial support for the $150,000 award is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.
Kollers research aims to build intelligent systems using techniques that underlie rational reasoning and learning. It unifies ideas from relational logic, which involves reasoning about objects and the relationships between them, and probability, which provides tools for dealing with uncertainty. Her synthesis of logic and probability is known as probabilistic relational modeling. She has also developed new mathematical and computational tools that allow us to learn from complex data the probabilistic rules that model the world, and to use these rules to reach strong conclusions about the world.