Dr. Cory Butz

Dr. Cory Butz is an outstanding ambassador for artificial intelligence in Canada and CAIAC since 2002. He has successfully contributed to AI and CAIAC in various leadership roles. This includes him chairing AI and AI/GI/CRV conferences in such challenging destinations as St. John’s, Nfld, and Regina, Sask. He twice (2) served as a General Co-Chair of the AI/GI/CRV conference, in Toronto in 2012 and in 2013, when it was held in Regina for the first time. Dr. Butz was a Program Co-Chair of the 24th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence held in St. John's in 2011. Dr. Butz's dedication and commitment to high quality of Canadian AI papers can be seen in that every paper published in the conference proceedings that year had at least four reviews, with more than half of the papers having five reviews. In 2017, he co-organized a tutorial when Canadian AI was held in Edmonton. In 2020, Dr. Butz’ student won CAIAC's Best Doctoral Dissertation award. This achievement is a rare example of the award won outside of typical AI hubs (GTA, Montreal, Edmonton).

Dr. Butz has been a long-serving executive member of the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association of Canada (CAIAC). He was CAIAC President in 2015-2017, then Past President in 2017-2019. All the four years I served as CAIAC Secretary and interacted with Dr. Butz on a regular basis. Dr. Butz has been instrumental in promoting the CAIAC Herald, an annual publication providing a snapshot of AI happenings across Canada, and in regular nominations for DSA and LTA CAIAC awards that recognize contributions of CAIAC colleagues. Dr. Butz also served two-year terms as Vice-President in 2013-2015. He first became involved with the CAIAC executive by serving on the Nominating Committee from 2009-2011.

Dr. Butz’s cutting-edge research on Bayesian networks has been published in top forums, including AAAI, and has drawn national invitations to talk at many Canadian universities and internationally at MIT, Cambridge University, and Google. He has served as the external examiner for doctoral candidates at the University of Waterloo, the University of Manitoba, the University of Saskatchewan, York University, and the University of Guelph. He has supervised twenty graduate students, some of whom have gone on to work at Google, Microsoft, and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He has also supervised seventeen NSERC USRA students, fostering the next generation of AI scholars. He has promoted AI to all ages across Canada through presentations to elementary school children and adults in the local pub talk seminar series and was prominently featured in a series of articles on artificial intelligence published in the Globe and Mail in 2011.

Dr. Butz is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Regina. For several years Dr. Butz has served as Vice-Dean and Acting Dean of Faculty of Science, University of Regina. He received the 2014 University of Regina Alumni Association Award for Excellence in Teaching.