Thanks to the generous support of the Class of 1961, graduate students from professor Hector Munoz-Avila’s InSyTe Laboratory (http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~munoz/) will be attending top-tier conferences in the field of Artificial Intelligence, where they will be presenting the results of their work. For example, this past summer PhD candidate Chad Hogg attended the Annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-08), where he presented his accepted paper on “Learning Hierarchical Task Networks from Observations”. Paper acceptance for these conferences is typically low. For AAAI-08 it was 25% – just one out every four submitted papers was accepted-. It is crucial that Lehigh maintains an active presence in such high-coveted conferences. These conferences are attended by decision-makers, including program managers from funding agencies. The generous support of Class of 1961 will help us move forward in these particularly difficult times.

On a personal note I will like to send an open invitation to the Class of 1961 to visit the InSyte Laboratory; we will be happy to demo some of the systems we have built. Just send me a note to hem4@lehigh.edu.