|
Description
The Executive Council of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence met on March 25, 2007, in Palo Alto, California.
Attending: Alan Mackworth, David Aha, Ron Brachman, Anthony Cohn, Lise Getoor, Maria Gini, Eric Horvitz, Kevin Knight, David Leake, Karen Myers, David Musliner, Michael Pazzani, Ted Senator, Holly Yanco, Sebastian Thrun, Mike Hamilton, Carol Hamilton.
Not Attending: Marie desJardins, Oren Etzioni, Yolanda Gil, Illah Nourbakhsh, Peter Stone
The meeting was called to order by AAAI President Alan Mackworth at 9:00 am. Mackworth noted that this was the first meeting of the association with its new name, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Introductions were made by members of the Executive Council, and the minutes of the previous meeting in July 2006, which had been circulated for review prior to the meeting, were formally approved.
Standing Committee Reports
Finance
Secretary-Treasurer Ted Senator reported that the return on investments during the past year has been good (13.5 percent gross), but the management fees remain too high (1.1 percent). He submitted an in-depth financial analysis, with the following recommended actions for the Executive Director or the Finance Committee: 1) Pursue refund of excess management fees paid to Morgan Stanley due to their failure to convert the Brandywine investment account from the Vision to Access programs; 2) Investigate alternative in vestment advisors who provide low-cost, institutional services for similar organizations in a wide range of asset classes; 3) Determine how to reallocate equity portfolio if an alternate advisor is found; 4) Establish on-line account access to Morgan Stanley accounts for access to month-end reports in a more timely manner.
The operating deficit for 2007 was approximately $450,000, which was more than $200,000 less than anticipated, largely due to a very successful conference, but also to unanticipated increased revenue in several other areas. The goal is to bring the deficit down to $300,000 from a high of $1.2 million several years ago. Senator noted that AAAI dispenses approximately $110,000 in grants, awards, conference subsidies, and student scholarships.
Awards/Fellows/Nominating
Past President Ron Brachman, who serves as Chair of all three of these committees, noted that the Awards Committee was currently reviewing nominations for the Classic Paper Award for the 1988 conference and the Distinguished Service Award. He encouraged Council members to send additional nominations to the committee. The Fellows Selection Committee was reviewing 30 nominations, and Brachman noted that it was a very strong group of candidates, making the selection very difficult. The Nominating Committee had selected a president-elect candidate and a slate of eight councilors. The ballot will be sent to the membership in April. Brachman reported that the question of international Council members and their ability to attend meetings was discussed by the Nominating Committee, but they did not feel this was an issue at this time. However, participation at the meetings is vital, so this should be made clear to all candidates.... |
More articles from AI Magazine
Introduction to the special issue on Innovative Applications of Artifi..., September 22, 2007
Constraint-based random stimuli generation for hardware verification., September 22, 2007
Expressive commerce and its application to sourcing: how we conducted ..., September 22, 2007
Heuristic search and information visualization methods for school redi..., September 22, 2007
The second international conference on Human-Robot Interaction.(Report..., September 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
(conference%20notes)%20%20&position=1)