Fahiem Bacchus
*(Photo by Jonathan Lung)*

The Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC) has presented Professor Fahiem Bacchus with a 2022 Lifetime Achievement Award.

As CAIAC’s highest honour, the award recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves through outstanding research excellence in artificial intelligence over the course of their more than 25-year academic career.

Bacchus received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Alberta in 1979, his master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1983, and his PhD in computer science in 1988. Later that same year he joined the University of Waterloo as a faculty member, where he remained for 11 years before taking on his current faculty position at the University of Toronto.

Throughout his career, Bacchus has made significant contributions to the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. His contributions can be felt both on the theoretical side, where his insights helped advance the mathematical foundations of that area, as well as in applications such as novel state-of-the-art solvers and planning systems. The scope of his impact can be felt from his 100 peer-reviewed publications which together have been cited over 10,000 times and won multiple best-paper awards, as well as from his solvers which won top placements in several international competitions.

In addition to his track-record of outstanding research contributions, Bacchus has a history of service towards the AI community. Most recently, he has been selected to serve as President of the Board of Trustees for the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI,) and is also the current chair of the SAT Association Board. Prior to this, he served as conference chair or program chair for several of the most prestigious conferences in AI, including IJCAI, the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, and the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling. And he is frequently invited to give keynote speeches or tutorials at conferences, including at CAIAC’s conference, Canadian AI, in 2004.

Past recipients of the CAIAC Lifetime Achievement Award from the Department of Computer Science include University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, Professor Emeritus Graeme Hirst, Professor Emeritus Hector Levesque and Professor Emeritus John Mylopoulos.

with files from CAIAC