Shapiro Elected Fellow of Artificial Intelligence Association

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Stuart C. Shapiro, Ph.D., professor of computer science at the University at Buffalo and chair of the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence of the Association for Computing Machinery (SIGART), has been elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

The AAAI is a nonprofit, scientific society devoted to the promotion and advancement of artificial intelligence -- what constitutes intelligent thought and behavior and how it can be exhibited in computers. The association publishes a quarterly journal, AI Magazine, and sponsors lectures, conferences and symposia.

An Amherst resident, Shapiro has been a member of UB's faculty since 1977. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1984-90 and as acting chair from 1978-79.

His research interests include cognitive science, computational linguistics, knowledge representation, reasoning, semantic networks, belief systems, natural language understanding and generation, expert systems and logic programming.

Currently, Shapiro is working with "Cassie," a computerized cognitive agent that communicates in natural language and is able to perform reasoning tasks. The purpose of this research is to discover how humans understand narrative.

Before coming to UB, he taught in the Computer Science Department at Indiana University. He has served as a consultant for the Rand Corporation for Analysis and Simulation, Inc., and for the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute. He also has been an external fellow in the University of Rochester's Cognitive Science Program.

The author of more than 100 technical articles and papers, Shapiro has published four books: "Techniques of Artificial Intelligence," "LISP: An Interactive Approach," "COMMON LISP: An Interactive Approach" and "The Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence." The latter was named Best New Book in Technology and Engineering in 1987 by the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. It was also named Outstanding Reference Source of 1989 by the American Library Association-Reference Book Bulletin.