Henry A. Kautz Retirement CelebrationUR yellowjacket

HenryFest: A Day of Talks

Saturday, May 20, 2023, 10AM—5PM

picture of Henry A. Kautz
Henry A. Kautz


Introduction

Professor Henry A. Kautz recently retired after more than 15 years at the University of Rochester. To celebrate Henry's distinguished career, the Computer Science Department, the Goergen Institute for Data Science, and the Hajim School of Engineering are jointly hosting a set of accessible, enjoyable talks on Artificial intelligence, highlighting the higher-level aspects of machine cognition, in keeping with the tenor of Henry's many years of groundbreaking research on practical algorithms for solving worst-case intractable problems in logical and probabilistic reasoning, automated planning, models for inferring human behavior from sensor data, pervasive healthcare applications of AI, and social media analytics. The talks are all open to the public, with free registration up to a capacity limit, either in-person or via Zoom.


Quick Links

Home
Introduction
Program
Registration
Lunch Break
The Department's Retirement-Announcement Text
Room Location(s)
Getting to Rochester
Directions to River Campus and Information on Parking
Things To Do in Rochester
Organizers

      



Program

Zoom link: Click here

The schedule for the day is as follows:

* indicates prerecorded video messages


Registration

Registration for the talks and attendance is free, but is required.

To register, please simply click on this registration link and on the form let us know that you will be attending in-person or attending remotely, and include your name, affiliation (if any, e.g., UR-CS UG student, or RIT CS faculty, or Google Mountain View), and email.

(Notes: (a) As a general matter and as a courtesy to the planning, please, please do register by May 10th.  However... if you did not register, but as May 20th arrives you wish to attend these talks, of course do register late and join the sessions. (b) The henryfest "at" lists "dot" rochester
"dot" edu email address goes to the HenryFest organizers.)


Lunch Break

Lunch will be provided for all registered participants.



The Department's Retirement-Announcement Text

Henry Kautz, Professor, Retires after 15 Years with URCS

Henry Kautz joined the Computer Science Department at Rochester in 2007, after spending 7 years as a faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle. He served as the CS Department Chair from 2008 through 2015. From 2018 to 2022 he served as Division Director for Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS) at the National Science Foundation, where he led the National AI Research Institutes program. He was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and was the founding director (2014-2018) of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester. He has been a researcher at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, and a full professor at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2010, he was elected President of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and in 2016 was elected Chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Section on Information, Computing, and Communication. His interdisciplinary research includes practical algorithms for solving worst-case intractable problems in logical and probabilistic reasoning; automated planning; models for inferring human behavior from sensor data; pervasive healthcare applications of AI; and social media analytics. In 1989 he received the IJCAI Computers & Thought Award, which recognizes outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence, and 30 years later received the 2018 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for career contributions that have breadth within computer science and that bridge computer science and other disciplines. At the 2020 AAAI Conference, he received both the Distinguished Service Award and the Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award. In 2022 he received the Most Impactful Paper Award from the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Conference.

Kautz is an internationally renowned expert in artificial intelligence, pervasive computing, and health care applications, and his research has been cited more than 34,000 times (h-index is currently 79) according to Google Scholar. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), for which he has also served as president.

In his retirement, Henry Kautz is Senior Advisor to the Schmidt Futures foundations for programs to help support open data for use in scientific applications of AI.



Room Location(s)

The room for the four talks of HenryFest will be Wegmans Hall, Room 1400. That room is the large auditorium partially on and partially below the ground floor of Wegmans Hall, which has been the new home of the CS department since 2017.

This is the the UR River Campus Map. You can see Wegmans Hall's location on it; it is near the lower part of the core campus, just north of the Hajim Science & Engineering Quadrangle.


Getting to Rochester

The university and the (see the Lodging section below) suggested hotel are each about a 10-minute drive from the airport (whose airport code is ROC).

Rochester also has train service (Amtrak) and bus service (Greyhound), which each drop you near downtown, about a 15-minute taxi ride to the university and the suggested hotel.


Directions to River Campus and Information on Parking

Information on visitor parking at River Campus of University of Rochester

What you should do is drive up to the visitor's information booth. The Visitor Info booth is just north of Elmwood Avenue and Trustee Rd., on Wilson Blvd.; it is marked on the River Campus map (see the earlier link).

If the booth is staffed (from 7:30am to 7:00pm weekdays), buy a one-day guest permit for $6 and obtain a campus map, and park in whatever lot the agent directs you to park in. (Allow for several minutes' walk from whatever lot you're directed to to Wegmans Hall.) After hours and on weekends there is no charge.

If the booth is not staffed, then the right thing to do is to drive about ten feet past the booth, U-turn, then turn left on Trustee Road, and then turn right on Intercampus Drive and then park in any space not specially marked as Handicapped/Reserved/Etc. in the Zone 2 South lots ("Bridge Lot" and the north end of Park Lot) or the Zone 3 South Lot (all of Park Lot except its north end).


Things To Do in Rochester

In case you arrive early or leave late, here are some pointers to fun things to do in Rochester:

As our own advice, the George Eastman House/Museum is probably the top attraction of Rochester. But there are many other great things to see: the Strong National Museum of Play (esp. for kids), the Seneca Park Zoo (esp. for kids), the Memorial Art Gallery (a very nice fine art museum), the Rochester Public Market (a large street market), the Lake Ontario shore (e.g., walking in Durand Eastman Park), and much more. The TripAdvisor.com link in the list above provides links to each of these along with reviews and information.


Organizers

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions; you can email the entire set of organizers by sending an email to the user-id "henryfest" in the domain "lists.rochester.edu".

Professor Jiebo Luo, University of Rochester

Professor Ehsan Hoque, University of Rochester

Webmaster: Hanjia Lyu, University of Rochester