Dr. Peter van Beek

Peter van Beek is a Full Professor and Associate Director  at the Cheriton School of Computer
Science at the University of Waterloo and the Co-Director of UW's newly-formed AI Institute.

He received his Masters and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. Robin Cohen.  Peter has been recognized for his research on constraint programming, constraint satisfaction as well as representation and reasoning, backtracking algorithms, planning, scheduling, combinatorial optimization, applied machine learning and probabilistic reasoning.

Peter served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Constraints from 2005-2009 and was co-editor of the Handbook of Constraint Programming, published in 2006. Peter has been recognized as well as a Mathematics Faculty Fellow, an IBM Canada CAS Fellow, and in 2008, he was named a Fellow of the Association of Artificial Intelligence.  

His service to the Artificial Intelligence community has been extensive.  He has an Associate Editor of the Artificial Intelligence journal, and currently serves as an Associate Editor for Computational Intelligence.  He is a regular PC member of IJCAI, AAAI and CP.  Even with his international success, Perter always found time to support the Canadian AI scene.  He has been in the PC for Canadian AI for as long as we can remember, served as Program Co-Chair in 2014, and has been member of the CAIAC's Dissertation Award committee on several occasions.

In recognition of Peter van Beek’s contribution to the Canadian AI scene, CAIAC is delighted to award him the 2019 Distinguished Service Award.