Hector Levesque

Who is Hector Levesque?

Hector Levesque is a Canadian academic and researcher in artificial intelligence.

He received his BSc, MSc and PhD 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 where he has remained since 1984.

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 60 research papers, and is the co-author of two books. Four of these papers have won best paper awards of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence in 1984, 1992, and 2006, and two other papers won similar awards at other conferences. In 2004, one of the 1984 papers was awarded the Classic Paper award of the AAAI, and the other 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.