David L. Waltz (28 May 1943 – 22 March 2012) was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He held positions in academia and industry and at the time of his death, was a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University where he directed the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Biography
Waltz was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1943. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where, as a student of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, he was part of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and received S.B. (1965), M.S. (1968) and Ph.D. (1972) degrees, all in Electrical Engineering.
His Ph.D. dissertation on computer vision ("Generating Semantic Descriptions from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows") initiated the field of constraint propagation[2], which allowed a computer program to generate a detailed three-dimensional view of an object given a two dimensional drawing with shadows. Following his graduate work at MIT, Waltz became a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1984 he joined Thinking Machines Corporation. There, his access to massively parallel supercomputers enabled him to work on new methods for information retrieval involving comparisons to large amounts of data. With Craig Stanfill, he originated the field of memory-based reasoning branch of case-based reasoning. His research interests also included massively parallel information retrieval, data mining, learning and automatic classification with applications protein structure prediction, and natural language processing and machine learning applications applied to the electric power grid.
Waltz was the Director of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University since 2003. He was formerly President of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, and from 1984 to 1993 was Director of Advanced Information Systems at Thinking Machines Corporation and Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University. He had also been Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign for 11 years.
Waltz served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 1997 to 1999 and is the former Chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). He was on the Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the board of the Computing Community Consortium of the Computing Research Association, and National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science Advisory Board.
He was on the Army Research Lab Technical Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the Technical Advisory Board of Cork Constraint Computation Center (4C), Ireland, and served on recent external advisory boards for Rutgers University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brown University, and école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
Awards
Waltz was elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1990[3] and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1998.[4] In 2011 he was selected as the recipient of the AAAI Distinguished Service Award for extraordinary and sustained service to the artificial intelligence community.
Personal life
David Waltz was married to Bonnie (Freedson) Waltz in 1970. They had two children, Vanessa Waltz (born 1972) and Jeremy Waltz (born 1975). In addition to his dedication to the scientific community, he was an extremely devoted husband and father, and his wife and children traveled regularly with him to many conferences and professional engagements throughout his career. Jeremy and wife Kathy had granddaughter Hannah in 2003, at which point "The Dude" became Waltz's nickname among family and friends.
Death
David Waltz died in the University Medical Center at Princeton, New Jersey on March, 22, 2012 from brain cancer; he was 68 years old.[5][6] Besides his wife, Bonnie Waltz, he is survived by a brother, Peter; a son, Jeremy; a daughter, Vanessa Waltz, and a granddaughter.
