1
(Former President, AAAI;
Fellow,
AAAI,
AAAS,
ACM)
Visitor number since yesterday.
Subbarao Kambhampati (Rao) was born a long long time ago in Peddapuram
in Andhra Pradesh, India. After formative education at "the school
next to Cinema Hall"
(where he liked the teacher of the 1st grade so much that he stayed in
that class for 2nd and 3rd grades too), the "School behind
Anjaneyaswamy Temple" (which has since been demolished to make way for
a sweet stall), Sri Veeraraju
High School (S.V. Highschool), and Sri Raja Vatsavaayi Buchchi
Seetayamma Jagapati Bahaddur Maharanee College
(S.R.V.B.S.J.B.M.R. College, no less!), he survived JEE and did his Bachelors in
Electrical Engineering (Electronics!--although he still couldn't
repair the tape recorder to his father's satisfaction) at the Indian Institute of
Technology, Madras (Alakananda, Jamuna & Tapati). Continuing along his degree grabbing spree, he
landed a Masters and a
Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.
After a brief post-doctoral stint at Stanford, Rao has been having a
blast crawling up the faculty hierarchy in the Computer Science department at ASU
since 1991. He started as a quarter professor, became a half Professor
in 1996 and a FULL (!) Professor in 2000. Continuing this geometric
rise, his current goal is to become two professors very soon (he is
waiting for the furlough season to pass first though, lest he be hit with two
furloughs).
Rao directs the Yochan research
group which is associated with the AI
Lab at ASU. In the good old days, he used to be mostly interested in
planning and decision-making capabilities for autonomous agents. Lately
he discovered humans, and decided they are fun to keep around as AI
takes over the world. Accordingly, his current research agenda revolves mainly
around
human-aware AI systems.
He is the recipient of a 1992
NSF Research Initiation Award, a 1994
NSF young investigator award,
a
2001-2002 College of Engineering teaching
excellence award, and a 2004 IBM Faculty Award and multiple
Google
Research Awards (2007, 2010, 2013 & 2016). In 2004, he was named a
Fellow of AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence). In 2011, he was selected by ASU students to give a Last Lecture.
In 2017, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2018, he was dubbed a
"distinguished almnnus" by the Computer Science Department of
University of Maryland, College Park (with his own
wall plaque and all!). In 2019, he was named a fellow of the
Association for the Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2022, IIT Madras also
relented and recognized him as a
"distinguished alumnus" of the Institute!
Within his department, he has been recognized both for his teaching
(Teacher of the year, 2012)
and research (Best Researcher, 2005, 2017). What Rao lacks in a
Wikipedia page, he more than makes up with his IMDB page.
He has been an
invited speaker at multiple conferences starting way back with
AAAI 1996 and . He also
gave a couple of well received tutorials on planning and databases,
including one on automated
planning (AAAI-2000), one on
information
integration on the web (AAAI-2002 and AAAI-2007), and one on
planning graph
heuristics (ICAPS 2006, IJCAI 2007).
Click
here
for further biographical information.
Here is a
detailed CV in pdf.
In 2013, Rao has been elected to the IJCAI Board of Trustees,
and had great fun
program-chairing the first-ever leap year edition of IJCAI 2016 that
just concluded in New York.
In the past, Rao served as the program co-chair for the 2005 National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence AAAI-05,
which in the impartial opinion of many people such as him was the best
AAAI ever (at least in 2005..). More, recently he co-chaired the 2010
AAAI special track on AI & Web, and served as a councilor for
AAAI for a thr
ee year term 2009-2012. He served as the
conference committee chair for AAAI during 2012-2014.
Rao served as
the program co-chair for ICAPS
2013 and as an area chair for IJCAI 2013. He will be a
senior program committee member for AAAI and ICAPS in 2014.
He also co-chaired the 2000 AI Planning and
Scheduling (AIPS) Conference, sat on the exalted ICAPS executive committee
(2002-2008).
He is on the
editorial board of ACM
Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology and IEEE Intelligent
Systems, and serves on the advisory board of JAIR (for which, he was an
associate editor earlier). He also served on the
editorial board for the
AI Magazine.
He had been on the
progam committees of most AAAIs since 1992; all AIPS, (most) ECP and all ICAPS
conferences, as well as a smattering of database conferences.
He served on the senior program committees of AAAI 2006,2008,2011,2012 and IJCAI
2007 (area chair) and 2009.
His professional service and his late-night TV
viewing intersected for once recently when he agreed to run the
first-ever Festivus at an
academic conference!
Rao thinks it is way cool to get paid for filling space with the sound
of his own voice.
Some students seem to agree with him, going as far as to get him
assorted
teaching awards,
or aggressively stuffing
ballots to get him a Teacher of the Year
nod.
Others are more inscrutable, trying their best to
make him give
the
last lecture.
Here, at any rate, are student
comments and
beauty numbers
from the teaching evaluations. Finally, here is an ornate statement of
his teaching
philosophy that Rao was asked to write for a teaching award
nomination. Here is a bit of
media coverage of Rao's teaching methods (and here he is trying to
improve his publication count
through letters to editor)..
Most of his courses are available these days on his very own
Youtube
Channel:
Professional service:
Rao served as the president of AAAI,
the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and did
his bit to
save the world from the impending Robot armageddon.
He was also a founding board of director of Partnership on AI . More
recently, he is serving as the chair of AAAS Section T (Information,
Communication and Computation).
Publications:
Here are online versions of
Rao's (okay, mostly his students') publications.
There is mounting evidence that at least some of these are
actually
read
by others.
One of them even received a
runner-up award for 10 year
influential paper at ICAPS 2010.
You can also find Rao's tutorials/survey talks
and such here
Talks & Tutorials:
Here are some of the recent overview talks and tutorials:
Current Group Members:
Students:
Alumni:
Visiting Scholars/PostDocs: