Professor Stephen Smith

President, Association for the Advancement of AI

Speaker

Stephen F. Smith is a Research Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Intelligent Coordination and Logistics Laboratory. Smith’s research focuses broadly on the theory and practice of next-generation technologies for automated planning, scheduling, and control of large multi-actor systems. He pioneered the development and use of constraint-based search and optimization models for solving planning and scheduling problems and has successfully fielded AI-based planning and scheduling systems in a range of application domains.

One principal application focus of Smith’s research for many years now has been urban mobility and smart transportation infrastructure. His work on smart traffic signals, which combines concepts from artificial intelligence and traffic theory, led to the development of Surtrac - an innovative decentralised system for real-time urban traffic signal control.

In 2015, Smith co-founded Rapid Flow Technologies Inc. to commercialise the Surtrac technology, and it is now deployed in over 40 North American cities. In 2022, Rapid Flow Technologies was acquired by Miovision, Inc., a larger player in the traffic technology industry.

Smith has published over 300 technical papers in the areas of automated planning and scheduling, search-based optimisation, multiagent systems and machine learning, and he has received numerous research and best paper awards. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has served on the AAAI Executive Council since 2014, and recently became AAAI President.

Smith’s current research interests include multiagent/multi-robot coordination, resilient planning and scheduling systems, stochastic optimisation, and intelligent transportation systems.