Patrick John Hayes or
Pat Hayes (
21 August 1944) is a
British computer scientist who lives and works in the
United States. As of March 2006, he is a Senior Research Scientist at the
Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in
Pensacola, Florida.
Pat Hayes has been an active, prolific, and influential figure in
Artificial Intelligence for over five decades. He has a reputation for being provocative but also quite humorous.
One of his earliest publications, with
John McCarthy, was the first thorough statement of the basis for the AI field of logical knowledge representation, introducing the notion of
situation calculus, representation and reasoning about time,
fluents, and the use of logic for representing knowledge in a computer. (insert citation for McCarthy&Hayes, 1969)
His next major contribution was the seminal work on "Naive Physics", which anticipated the expert systems movement in many ways
and called for researchers in AI to actually
try to represent knowledge in computers. Although not the first to mention the word "ontology" in computer science (that distinction belongs to John McCarthy), Hayes was one of the first to actually do it, and inspired an entire generation of researchers in knowledge engineering, logical formalizations of commonsense reasoning, and ontology.
In the middle 1990s, while serving as president of
AAAI, Hayes began a series of attacks on critics of AI, mostly phrased in an ironic light, and (together with his colleague Kenneth Ford) invented an award named after
Simon Newcomb to be given for the most ridiculous argument "disproving" the possibility of AI. The Newcombe Awards are announced in the
AI Magazine published by
AAAI.
At the turn of the century he became active in the
Semantic Web community, contributing substantially (perhaps solely) to the revised semantics of
RDF known as RDF-Core, one of the three designers (along with
Peter Patel-Schneider and
Ian Horrocks) of the
Web Ontology Language semantics, and most recently contributed to
SPARQL. He is also, along with philosopher
Christopher Menzel the primary designer of the ISO
Common Logic standard.
He has been secretary of AISB, chairman and trustee of
IJCAI, associate editor of
Artificial Intelligence Journal, a governor of the Cognitive Science Society and president of
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Hayes is a charter Fellow of
AAAI and of the
Cognitive Science Society
According to his website, his current research interests include "
knowledge representation and automatic
reasoning, especially the representation of
space and
time; the
semantic web; ontology design; and the
philosophical foundations of
AI and
computer science". 
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