Carnegie Mellon University's Stephen Smith, a research professor in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute, was voted president-elect of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

"It is a great honor for me to serve as AAAI's next president-elect. I'm excited for the opportunity to help AAAI steer the AI research enterprise forward and looking forward to the challenge," Smith said.

Smith's research focuses broadly on the theory and practice of next-generation technologies for automated planning, scheduling and control of large multiactor systems. He pioneered the development and use of constraint-based search and optimization models for solving planning and scheduling problems, and has successfully fielded AI-based planning and scheduling systems in a range of application domains.

An AAAI fellow, Smith has won several best paper awards and received AAAI's 2018 Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Westminster College, and both a master's and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh.

Smith will serve two years as president-elect before assuming the AAAI presidency for two years. He will then serve two years as past president. Smith replaces Francesca Rossi as president-elect. Rossi, an IBM fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader, became AAAI president in July.

"I am very happy that the AAAI community has chosen Stephen as the next president. His experience on AI publications and his long service to AAAI will facilitate, support and accelerate AAAI's activities toward a more impactful association. I'm looking forward to working with him," Rossi said.

Read more about AAAI and Smith's role as president-elect on the organization's website.