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LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 21 February 2017 – Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) Sven Koenig has been named recipient of the 2017 Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. Koenig was recognized by the IEEE Computer Society “for his commitment to engaging students through project-based learning and mentoring that cultivates a passion for artificial intelligence.”
Koenig’s research is primarily centered around techniques for decision making that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments. He also served as program director at NSF, where one of his responsibilities was to help manage the Research Experiences for Undergraduates Sites program.
Koenig is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a senior member of IEEE. He was conference or program co-chair of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) in 2004, the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in 2005, the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) in 2009, the AAAI Conference in 2015, and the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence in 2016 and 2017.
He is the chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, an editor of Artificial Intelligence Magazine and the Communications of the ACM, and an associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal, the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems journal, and the Advances in Complex Systems journal. He was a councilor of AAAI, a member of the advisory board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, an associate editor of Computational Intelligence, and a member of the steering committees of ICAPS and SoCS.
A repeat judge at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Koenig co-organized many USC Programming Contests and has developed several open-source project texts that teach concepts from artificial intelligence with video games. His "Programming Pinball Machines" project developed hardware and software that let undergraduate students program games on an actual pinball machine.
The Computer Science & Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions to undergraduate education through both teaching and service. The award consists of a plaque, certificate, and a $2,000 honorarium, and will be presented at a dinner and ceremony on 14 June 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona.
Further information about the award, including a list of past recipients, may be found at: www.computer.org/web/awards/cse-undergrad-teaching.
