Palo Alto, California: Like a good gambler, Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), sees the world as a web of probabilities. There is, however, nothing uncertain about her impact.
Up to challenges: Koller, a mathematical theoretician who is applying models of AI in fields such as molecular biology, says she tries to persuade her students to stay on in academia and not rush off to join start-ups.
A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas such as robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for AI that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things such as predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.
Koller’s work, building on an 18th-century theorem about probability, has already had an important commercial impact, and her colleagues say that will grow in the coming decade. Her techniques have been used to improve computer vision systems and in understanding natural language, and in the future they are expected to lead to an improved generation of Web search.
“She’s on the bleeding edge of the leading edge,” said Gary Bradski, a machine vision researcher at Willow Garage, a robotics start up firm in Menlo Park, California.
Koller was honoured last week with a new computer sciences award sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Indian computer-services firm Infosys Technologies Ltd.
The award to Koller, with a prize of $150,000 (Rs60.3 lakh), is viewed by scientists and industry executives as validating her research, which has helped transform AI from science fiction and speculation into an engineering discipline that is creating an array of intelligent machines and systems. It is not the first such recognition; in 2004, Koller received a prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship.
Koller is part of a revival of interest in AI. After three decades of disappointments, AI researchers are making progress. Recent developments made possible spam filters, Microsoft’s new ClearFlow traffic maps and the driverless robotic cars that Stanford teams have built for competitions sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Since arriving at Stanford as a professor in 1995, Koller has led a group of researchers who have reinvented the discipline of AI.
Pioneered during the 1960s, the field was originally dominated by efforts to build reasoning systems from logic and rules. Judea Pearl, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, had a decade earlier advanced statistical techniques that relied on repeated measurements of real world phenomena.