In 1985, I moved east to join AT&T Bell Laboratories and build an AI research group. Over the following years, that group--the AI Principles Research Department--grew substantially, and eventually became two departments, the second one focusing on machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing. Amongst our more well-known work in knowledge represenation at AT&T was the CLASSIC system, a well-founded description logic system with limited representational power in order to support tractable reasoning. With CLASSIC, we implemented the PROSE product configuration system, which was deployed and used in AT&T and later, Lucent Technologies. There were some 15 different PROSE configuration products built, and overall PROSE systems have processed more than $5 billion worth of equipment orders. Our AI team at AT&T has been one of the stronger groups in the world over the last decade or so, having counted in its ranks at various times a substantial number of truly outstanding researchers, among whom were David Etherington, Bart Selman, Henry Kautz, Fernando Pereira, Michael Kearns, Rob Schapire, Julia Hirschberg, David McAllester, Rich Sutton, Peter Stone, Michael Littman, Yoram Singer, Yoav Freund, Peter Patel-Schneider, Deborah McGuinness, and many others.
In 1994, I was promoted to become the Director
of the lab we were in (Software and Systems Research). In 1996, as
AT&T was spinning off Lucent Technologies, I was part of the original
senior management of AT&T Labs, and helped form AT&T
Labs-Research, at that time led by A. G. "Sandy" Fraser. At that
time, my lab became the Information Systems and Services Research laboratory,
and besides AI (led by Fernando Pereira and Henry Kautz, and subsequently,
Michael Kearns), we had strong teams in HCI (led by Julia Hirschberg and
later, Candy Kamm), Secure Systems (led by Dave Maher and then Bill Aiello),
IP communications services (led by Larry Jackel), Online platforms and
innovative Web services, including secure digital music distribution (led
by Gregg Vesonder) and Customer Decision Modeling (led by John Rotondo).
We created innovative services ranging from audio-enhanced instant messaging
to Universal Message Access (now serving almost 3 million customers) to
collaborative listening to music. In 2001, we changed the name of
our lab to Communications Services Research to reflect our focus on unified
communications and related services.
In addition to working in AI, I have been active
in the Knowledge Discovery in Databases research community (I have been
on the KDD Conference Steering Committee), and have published the information
retrieval, database management, and software engineering literatures.
Prior to that, for 9 years I was the Secretary-Treasurer
of IJCAII -- International Joint Conferences
on Artificial Intelligence, Inc. I stepped down
in 2002 (yielding to my successor, Samy Uthurusamy, of General Motors)
in order to be able to perform my duties as President of AAAI. I
have also been a member of the Editorial Board of the journal, Artificial Intelligence,
as well as several other boards.