Bart Selman


Bart Selman is a Dutch-American professor of computer science at Cornell University. He has previously worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He is also co-founder and principal investigator of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Berkeley artificial intelligence expert Stuart J. Russell, and co-chair of the Computing Community Consortium's 20-year roadmap for AI research.
Selman attended Technical University of Delft, from where he received a master's degree in physics, graduating in 1983.
He received his masters and PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto in 1985 and 1991 respectively.
Selman's research focuses is on the increasing and changing role of machines and computing in society. His studies at Center for Human-Compatible AI focus on the potential risks and negative impacts of advanced AI. An expert in AI Safety, he studies how computing has shifted from ethics-neutral software to predictive algorithms and advocates for integrating ethics and AI.
He has authored over 90 publications, which have appeared in journals including Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has presented at several conferences in the fields of artificial intelligence and computer science.
Selman has received five Best Paper Awards for his work, including the Cornell Stephen Miles Excellence in Teaching Award, the Cornell Outstanding Educator Award, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery. He sits on the advisory board for the DARPA Grand Challenge Cornell Team.
His research concepts include tractable inference, knowledge representation, stochastic search methods, theory approximation, knowledge compilation, planning, default reasoning, satisfiability solvers like WalkSAT, and connections between computer science and statistical physics, namely phase transition phenomena.
Selman teaches courses on artificial intelligence at Cornell University and advises postdoctoral fellows.

Partial list of Selman's papers