Website: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hector/
Biography of Hector Levesque
Hector Levesque received his BSc, MSc and PhD all from the University of Toronto in 1975, 1977, and 1981, respectively. After graduation, he accepted a position at the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research in Palo Alto, and then joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1984 where he remained until his retirement in 2014.
His research is in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence. On the representation side, he has worked on the formalization of a number of concepts pertaining to artificial and natural agents including belief, goals, intentions, ability, and the interaction between knowledge, perception and action. On the reasoning side, his research mainly concerns how automated reasoning can be kept computationally tractable, including the use of greedy local search methods.
Hector Levesque has published over 70 research papers and three books. Four of these papers have won best paper awards of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1984, 1984 again, 1992, and 2006, and two other papers won similar awards at other conferences. Two of the AAAI papers went on to receive Classic Paper awards of the AAAI, in 2004 and in 2011, and another one was given an honourable mention. In 2006, a paper written in 1990 was given the inaugural Influential Paper Award by the International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
Hector Levesque was elected to the Executive Council of the AAAI, was a co-founder of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and is on the editorial board of five journals, including the journal Artificial Intelligence. In 2001, Hector Levesque was the Conference Chair of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and served as President of the Board of Trustees of IJCAI from 2001 to 2003.
In 1985, Hector Levesque became the first non-American to receive the Computers and Thought Award given by IJCAI. He was the recipient of an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for 1990-91. He is a founding Fellow of the AAAI and was a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1984 to 1995. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2006, and to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011. In 2012, Hector Levesque received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Canadian AI Association, and in 2013, the Research Excellence Award given by IJCAI. In 2021, he received the Allen Newell Award given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and AAAI.
Short Biography of Hector Levesque
After a brief stint as a toddler, Hector Levesque worked as a student for about thirty years, and then as a faculty member at the University of Toronto for thirty years after that. His research was in the area of AI where he was recognized with a number of awards and distinctions. He retired from active duty in July 2014 and now works on projects that are more like this and that.
Music Projects
These are good! đ
What is an aging academic to do when his faculty job is winding down, and he stops being professor activus and starts being professor emeritus? âWork on other stuff, thatâs what! âIn my case, a lot of it has to do with music.
DISCLAIMER: There are a number of music files on this site that were made by me for the fun of it. If you enjoy listening to them, thatâs great! If you want to use them for some purpose of your own, go ahead, itâs fine with me. Regarding intellectual property, copyright, and the like, I believe I am not infringing on anyone elseâs, and as for my own, I donât really care. If you think you can actually make money with these files, more power to you. If youâre successful, send me a big cheque!
There are currently the following musical projects on this site:
- Eight Tunes (1995)
- Nocturnes for Nighthawks (2008)
- A Fistful of Notes (2013)
- For a Few Notes More (2019)
- Variations on Algorithm (2020)
- Rach2 (2022)
- Rolling over Beethoven (2022)
- Three Adagios (2023)
- On a Clare Day (2023)
- My Melancholy Baby (2024)
- Stagioni (2024)
There is also musical software to check out here.
I want to thank my family and friends who were nothing but encouraging as I spent many hours over the years noodling away with musical equipment and MIDI. A very special thanks to two of them: Patrick Feehan, who was so helpful and inspiring when I was getting started in 1990, and then never let up; and Jim des RiviĂšres, who made me wonderful CD covers when I wanted them, and who goaded me into continuing with musical endeavours whenever I was starting to let up. Without the encouragement of these two, I might have taken up golf.
Eight Tunes (1995) - liked this one
The pieces in this collection are among my first real attempts at composing music for synthesizers (mainly a Korg M1 and a Yamaha DX7). I didnât really know what the pieces were about and so I named them using colours. I still donât know what theyâre about, but now I feel that there is a certain cinematic aspect to some of them.
At one point, I had requested that White be played at my funeral.
MP3 Files 01. Green 3:30 02. Magenta 4:43 03. Gold 3:37 04. Blue 5:03 05. Brown 4:26 06. Mauve 5:12 07. Orange 3:34 08. White 4:07 ------- 34:12