IN MEMORIAM: RAYMOND REITER

Raymond Reiter, professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and winner of the 1993 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Research Excellence Award, died September 16, 2002, after a yearlong struggle with cancer. Reiter, known throughout the world as “Ray,” made foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and databases, and theorem proving. Ray was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1939 to immigrant parents who came from Poland. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1961, and an M.S. degree in mathematics in 1963 from the University of Toronto. He received a Ph.D. in 1967 from the University of Michigan. His thesis was entitled “A study of a model for parallel computations.” His thesis advisor was Harvey Garner, but he was also motivated by Dick Karp who was then on leave from IBM. Ray wrote many seminal articles, some of which are described below. He also coedited two books (Brachman, Levesque, and Reiter 1989, 1991) and published a book on dynamical systems (Reiter 2001), discussed below. He served the scientific community by being program chair or coprogram chair of important conferences and workshops and as an editor, or on the editorial board of journals, such as the Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. He was a fellow of the ACM and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

[1]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  SOME REPRESENTATIONAL ISSUES IN DEFAULT REASONING , 1980 .

[2]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Circumscription and Generic Mathematical Objects , 1994, Fundam. Informaticae.

[3]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Foundations of Assumption-based Truth Maintenance Systems: Preliminary Report , 1987, AAAI.

[4]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  On Formalizing Database Updates: Preliminary Report , 1992, EDBT.

[5]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  The Frame Problem in the Situation Calculus: A Simple Solution (Sometimes) and a Completeness Result for Goal Regression , 1991, Artificial and Mathematical Theory of Computation.

[6]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  On Inheritance Hierarchies With Exceptions , 1983, AAAI.

[7]  Jack Minker,et al.  On Indefinite Databases and the Closed World Assumption , 1987, CADE.

[8]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  A Theory of Diagnosis from First Principles , 1986, Artif. Intell..

[9]  Alex M. Andrew,et al.  Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems , 2002 .

[10]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  A Logic for Default Reasoning , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[11]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  On Reasoning by Default , 1978, TINLAP.

[12]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Deductive Question-Answering on Relational Data Bases , 1977, Logic and Data Bases.

[13]  Robert A. Kowalski,et al.  Linear Resolution with Selection Function , 1971, Artif. Intell..

[14]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  A Logical Framework for Depiction and Image Interpretation , 1989, Artif. Intell..

[15]  Raymond Reiter.  Two Results on Ordering for Resolution with Merging and Linear Format , 1971, JACM.

[16]  Grigoris Antoniou,et al.  Nonmonotonic reasoning , 1997 .

[17]  J. McCarthy.  Situations, Actions, and Causal Laws , 1963 .

[18]  Raymond Reiter,et al.  Towards a Logical Reconstruction of Relational Database Theory , 1982, On Conceptual Modelling.

[19]  Raymond Reiter.  On Closed World Data Bases , 1977, Logic and Data Bases.