Announcing 2020 Awards

The Washington Academy of Sciences is pleased to announce its awards for 2020 to recognize work of merit and distinction of scientists and leaders in the greater Washington area. Although we could not celebrate the awardees at our traditional banquet this year, we hosted an online event to meet them on Sept. 10.
The 2020 award recipients are listed here.

The keynote speaker for the 2020 Awards Ceremony was 
Dr. Yolanda Gil.  Her talk was titled:

“Thoughtful Artificial Intelligence:
Forging A New Partnership for Data Science and
Scientific Discovery”

ABSTRACT
Artificial intelligence will play an increasingly prominent role in scientific research ecosystems, and will become indispensable as more interdisciplinary science questions are tackled. While in recent years computers have propelled science by crunching through data and leading to a data science revolution, qualitatively different scientific advances will result from advanced intelligent technologies for crunching through knowledge and ideas. In this talk, I will propose seven principles for developing “thoughtful artificial intelligence”, which will turn intelligent systems into partners for scientists. I will present a personal perspective on a research agenda for thoughtful artificial intelligence, and discuss its potential for data science and scientific discovery.

SPEAKER BIO
Dr. Yolanda Gil is Director for Major Strategic Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She is also Director of the USC Center for Knowledge-Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science. She received her MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence. Her research is on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture and discovery, which she investigates in a variety of projects concerning scientific discovery, knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation and metadata, and community-wide development of knowledge bases. Dr. Gil collaborates with scientists in different domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery.  She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and Past Chair of its Special Interest Group in Artificial Intelligence. She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and was elected as its 24th President in 2016.

Since 1898, the Washington Academy of Sciences has served as the affiliation of Washington D.C. area scientific societies. The formation of the Academy culminated a decade of planning under the leadership of the Philosophical Society of Washington. The founders included Alexander Graham Bell and Samuel Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The purpose of the new Academy was to encourage the advancement of science and “to conduct, endow, or assist investigation in any department of science.” That purpose guided the Academy throughout its first 100 years and will continue to be our guide through the current century.

The Washington Academy of Sciences has published articles of scientific interest continuously since 1899, first as The Proceedings until 1911, when it became The Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. The Tables of Contents of 100+ issues of the Journal are listed here.