Faculty Directory

Dana Nau is a Professor at the University of Maryland, in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Systems Research. He received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Missouri S&T (then University of Missouri-Rolla) in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1979.

Dr. Nau does research in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of automated planning and game theory. He has more than 300 refereed technical publications, has chaired ICAPS and several other conferences, and has been on the editorial boards of JAIR, ACM TIST, and several other journals. Some of his accomplishments include:

• The discovery of pathological game trees, in which looking farther ahead produces worse decision-making.
• The AI planning and game-tree search algorithm used by the computer program that won the 1997 world championship of computer bridge. Articles about this appeared in several major media.
• The SHOP, SHOP2, and Pyhop automated-planning systems. These have been downloaded more than 20,000 times and have been used in hundreds (thousands?) of projects worldwide.
• Two graduate-level textbooks, Automated Planning: Theory and Practice and Automated Planning and Acting.
• Game-theoretic studies of the evolution of cultural characteristics such as third-party punishment and ethnocentrism.

Dr. Nau is an AAAI Fellow and an ACM Fellow.

Artificial intelligence; computer integrated design and manufacturing; planning; search

A list of Dr. Nau's publications can be found here.