The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) are pleased to announce that the 2023 AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award recipient is Ayanna Howard of The Ohio State University.
The AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator was established in 2016 to recognize a person (or group of people) who has (have) made major contributions to AI education that provide long-lasting benefits to the AI community. Examples might include innovating teaching methods, providing service to the AI education community, generating pedagogical resources, designing curricula, and educating students outside of higher education venues or the general public about AI.
Dr. Howard received this award for increasing accessibility to computing resources for children with special needs, promoting the use of social robots to engage children in education, and working with students at all levels to increase diversity and access in computing, engineering, and AI.
As part of the award, Dr. Howard has been invited to give the 2023 EAAI Talk, entitled Socially Interactive Robots for Supporting Early Interventions for Children with Special Needs. It is estimated 15% of children aged 3 through 17 born in the U.S. have one or more developmental disabilities. For many of these children, proper early intervention is provided as a mechanism to support the child’s academic, developmental, and functional goals from birth and beyond. With the recent advances in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), early intervention protocols using robots are now ideally positioned to make an impact in this domain. In this talk, Dr. Howard will discuss the role of robotics and AI for engaging children with special needs and highlight our methods and preclinical studies that bring us closer to this goal.
The award will be presented at the conference for the Annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in February and is accompanied by an honorarium of $1,000.
Many sponsors support the AAAI-23 Conference, including Diamond Sponsor Sony, Platinum Sponsors Amazon Science and IBM, and Gold Sponsors Bloomberg Engineering and Colossal-AI.
For a complete view of the conference program, agenda, and full list of sponsors, please refer to https://aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI-23.
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About the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Founded in 1979, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is a nonprofit scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. AAAI aims to promote research in and responsible use of artificial intelligence and increase public understanding of the field. For more information, see www.aaai.org.