After thinking about this problem for a number of years, Ive decided t — Charles Lee Isbell Jr

"I’m energized by this chance to serve the citizens of Illinois and advance the mission of learning, discovery, engagement and economic development”"

"I think of my field as interactive artificial intelligence. My fundamental research goal is to understand how to build autonomous agents that must live and interact with large numbers of other intelligent agents, some of whom may be human. Progress towards this goal means that we can build artificial systems that work with humans to accomplish tasks more effectively; can be more robust to changes in environment, relationships, and goals; and can better co-exist with humans as long-lived partners."

"All in all, I believe that there are many opportunities in this space, and it should interest anyone who cares about any of the areas I mention above. To that end, I have spent time building The Laboratory for Interactive Artificial Intelligence and the pfunk research group. Our research goal is to develop methodologies for building persistent, adaptive, collaborative, and believable agents that must live with other similar agents, including humans."

"Although I tend to focus on statistical machine learning, my research passion is actually artificial intelligence. I like to build large integrated systems, so I have also tended to spend a great deal of my time doing research on autonomous agents, interactive entertainment, some aspects of HCI, software engineering, and even programming languages."

"Definitely related to these efforts, I have put a great deal of energy into thinking about access at all levels, with an eye toward broadening participation in the professoriate. I dont have dozens of papers in this space, but I care about it as deeply as I do my AI research and all the rest that I do. Generally speaking, I split my time among my professor and admin selves because I think efforts around operationalizing and supporting broad access deserve as much intellectual energy and thought as any of our other academic efforts"

"It is also worth pointing out that I have developed a strong interest in (re)defining Computing as a separate and vivid discipline. This has most obviously manifested itself in my efforts at curricular development and reform. Possibly related to these efforts, I was the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the College for a number of years before becoming the Senior Associate Dean and eventually the Executive Associate Dean (where I retained my role in Academic Affairs while overseeing a lot of the operations of the College). I was lucky enough to serve as the fourth John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the College. After four years doing that, I became the Provost at University of Wisconsin-Madison."