UW CSE affiliate professor Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft Research in Redmond, has been recognized with the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for his groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction.
The Newell Award recognizes career contributions that have breadth within computer science and/or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Horvitz’s work does both, combining the theoretical with the practical and leveraging human and machine intelligence to deliver technologies that improve people’s lives. He has made countless, lasting contributions to Microsoft and to the field of computing through his work in the areas of time-critical decisions, information retrieval, health care, urban infrastructure, sustainability and development. His trailblazing research has produced computational models for assisting physicians in minimizing patient readmissions; predictive analytics for traffic flow and routing; and techniques for prioritizing and interpreting email.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeannette Wing says of Horvitz, “He asks big questions: How do our minds work? What computational principles and architectures underlie thinking and intelligent behavior? How can computational models perform amidst real-world complexities such as sustainability and development? How can we deploy computation systems that deliver value to people and society?”
The Newell Award is a fitting acknowledgment of the scale and importance of Horvitz’s work. Read more about his many accomplishments on the Microsoft blog here and in the ACM press release here.
Congratulations, Eric!