Fetch Technology CTO Honored for Influential Contributions to Artificial Intelligence Technology
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Awards Steve Minton with a 2008 “Classic Paper Award”
LOS ANGELES, Calif. - July 2008 - Dr. Steve Minton, Chairman and CTO of Fetch Technologies, along with co authors Mark D. Johnston, Andrew B. Phillips and Philip Laird were today honored for their influential work on a class of artificial intelligence (AI) problems known as “constraint satisfaction.”
Constraint satisfaction problems are complex problems that can be described by a fixed set of constraints. They arise in a wide variety of far-reaching artificial intelligence applications - from extracting information from web sites to mission critical scheduling decisions for the Hubble Space Telescope and optimizing manufacturing production lines.
Dr. Minton’s research paper introduced an approach to solving these complex problems by creating an inherently “buggy” partial solution that is subsequently “repaired.” Reverse-engineered in part from analyzing a neural network built by scientists for scheduling the Hubble Space Telescope, Dr. Minton’s team was able identify and distill the key underpinnings of this network and formulate a general approach that could be applied to many problems. The paper demonstrated that the new approach method could overwhelmingly outperform previous “backtracking” techniques, which was a breakthrough development in artificial intelligence technology.
“Dr. Minton’s research has been extremely influential in solving important business problems” says Robert Landes, CEO of Fetch Technologies. “Over the course of his career, Steve has led Fetch Technologies in our ability to help businesses leverage new data sources. This award further highlights the contribution he and his colleagues have made to both AI science and its practical application to real world problems.”
Entitled, “Solving Large-Scale Constraint Satisfaction and Scheduling Problems Using a Heuristic-Repair Method,” Dr. Minton’s research paper was recognized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for its, “seminal contribution to stochastic local search for constraint satisfaction and its broad influence on local search algorithms and applications in artificial intelligence.” The award honors the most influential paper from a previous conference, in this case the 8th annual National AI Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.
About Fetch Technologies
Fetch Technologies is a leading provider of Artificial Intelligence-based Web Integration solutions. Developed under funding by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NSF, NASA, the Air Force, and other U.S. Government agencies, the Fetch Agent Platform provides fast and powerful integration of data from virtually any data repository. Customers include Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, search-and-retrieval companies, electronic publishers, and more. For more information, please visit www.fetch.com or call 310-414-9849.
