Professor Emeritus Hector Levesque has been awarded the prestigious 2020 Allen Newell Award by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

The award recognizes Levesque’s fundamental contributions to knowledge representation and reasoning, and their broader influence within theoretical computer science, databases, robotics, and the study of Boolean satisfiability.

The award citation details the breadth of Levesque’s impact:

“Levesque is recognized for his outstanding contributions to the broad core of logic-inspired artificial intelligence and the impact they have had across multiple sub-disciplines within computer science. With collaborators, he has made fundamental contributions to cognitive robotics, multi-agent systems, theoretical computer science, and database systems, as well as in philosophy and cognitive psychology. These have inspired applications such as the semantic web and automated verification. He is internationally recognized as one of the deepest and most original thinkers within AI and a researcher who has advanced the flame that AI pioneer Alan Newell lit.”

Levesque received his BSc, MSc and PhD all from the University of Toronto in 1975, 1977, and 1981, respectively. After graduation, he worked at the Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research in Palo Alto before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1984 where he remained until his retirement in 2014.