Austin Tate

For the American football player and coach, see A. Austin Tate.

Austin Tate is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2019 he was Director of AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

Austin Tate FREng FRSE
Born	(1951-05-12) 12 May 1951 Knottingley, West Yorkshire, England
Alma mater	Lancaster University (BSc) University of Edinburgh (MSc, PhD)
Known for	AI Planning Artificial Intelligence Virtual Worlds
Spouse	Margaret Tate
Awards	AAAI Fellow (1993)
Scientific career
Fields	Artificial intelligence
Institutions	University of Edinburgh
Thesis	Using Goal Structure to Direct Search in a Problem Solver (1975)
Doctoral advisor	Donald Michie
Doctoral students	Carla Gomes
Website	www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/

He is known for his contributions to AI Planning, applications of Artificial Intelligence, and work on collaborative systems in Virtual Worlds.

Early life and education

Tate was born 12 May 1951, Knottingley, West Yorkshire, UK. He completed his B.A. (Hons) Computer Studies, Lancaster University, 1969-1972. He completed his postgraduate study in Machine Intelligence at University of Edinburgh, supervised by Donald Michie, 1972-1975 and a Master of Science degree in e-Learning at the University of Edinburgh, 2011-2012.

Research and career

Tate's research interests are in Artificial intelligence.

Selected publications

• Tate, A. (1977) Generating Project Networks, Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77), pp. 888–893, Cambridge, MA, USA, Morgan Kaufmann.
• Currie, K.; Tate, A. (1991). "O-Plan: The open planning architecture". Artificial Intelligence. 52: 49–86. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.26.2844. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(91)90024-E. S2CID 943552.
• Tate, A., Levine, J., Dalton, J. and Nixon, A. (2003) Task Achieving Agents on the World Wide Web, in "Spinning the Semantic Web" (Fensel, D., Hendler, J., Liebermann, H. and Wahlster, W.), Chapter 15, pp. 431–458, MIT Press, 2003.
• Tate, A. (2006). "The "Helpful Environment": Geographically Dispersed Intelligent Agents That Collaborate". IEEE Intelligent Systems. 21 (3): 57–61. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.62.8806. doi:10.1109/MIS.2006.61. S2CID 25195858.
• Tate, A.; Chen-Burger, Y. H.; Dalton, J.; Potter, S.; Richardson, D.; Stader, J.; Wickler, G.; Bankier, I.; Walton, C.; Williams, P. (2010). "I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems. 25 (4): 62–71. doi:10.1109/MIS.2010.5. hdl:20.500.11820/031ec5f0-40f6-45c6-a7f6-a0a4ebe12b7c. S2CID 6699929.
• Other Publications: O-Plan Papers, I-X Papers

Honours and awards

Tate's awards and honours include:

• 1993 – Elected AAAI Fellow
• 1998 – Fellow of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)
• 1999 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE)
• 1999 – Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI)
• 2000 – Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS)
• 2006 – Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB)
• 2012 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng)

Personal life

He was married in 1975 to Margaret (née Mowbray) at Knottingley, West Yorkshire, England.

External links

• Research: AIAI Planning and Activity Management Group website
• AI Planners: Traverser, Interplan, Nonlin, O-Plan, I-X/I-Plan
• Example Projects: AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies), CoAX (Coalition Agents eXperiment), FireGrid, OpenKnowledge, I-Room, OpenVCE
• Virtual World Avatar: Ai Austin's website
• Interests: Austin Tate's Gerry Anderson Web Area, Supercar, Fireball XL5