How to cook a book?

Last November we decided to go back to the plan of a book from DannyFest.


We send the following email to everyone we knew was at  DannyFest, but we know many others would like to know about it. So here is the message, repeated.

We have not been able to collect the contributions, yet, and have sent another message extending the deadline to 15 Fev, so if you working on one, please get in touch!

NB: Here's the Latex template for articles in the book, do let us know of any problems.

Dear all,

Time passes fast, too fast for most of us to notice and today is Danny Bobrow’s eighty-first birthday. It may be hard to believe, but Dannyfest, that wonderful celebration of Danny’s life and work took place eight years ago and so it is certainly time, way past time actually, to put together a collection of papers and more informal short pieces in honor of our friend who has been such a wonderful collaborator and mentor for so many of us.

Happily, we have recently received confirmation from Dov Gabbay that he would be happy to publish a volume in the Tributes Series of College Publications. Our plan is to initially publish the volume as an e-book so that it can be put out quickly and so that Danny can enjoy it as soon as possible. The printed version will appear soon afterwards.

We are writing to you now to ask you to contribute a paper or reminiscence. While the papers should be around 10 printed pages in length, the more personal tributes could be as long or as short as you wish. While we have waited far too long in making this happen, we believe that it is important to work as fast as we can now. Therefore, we are asking if you would be willing to prepare your contribution by the middle of January, 2017,  since that would be ideal. We do have videos available of the papers that were presented at the celebration. They are in YouTube’s Dannyfest playlist on the channel http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgkIf-gHNvuDLL7WM00yDdItqPcbj_Q5o.

 In order to permit a very fast turn around from submission to publication, we are requesting that submissions be prepared in latex using a template we will make available to you, when you reply to this email. But contributions in Word format are perfectly acceptable as well.

With best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season and hopes to hear from you soon,

Valeria, Cleo, Livia and Johan

One more video from DannyFest

I should check with Johan if the quality of the videos in YouTube is the same as the  the copies he has.

Barney Pell and Ron Kaplan on Powerset and other stories

Barney Pell's talk, in a virtual double bill with Ron Kaplan, "Getting NLP to market quickly: a 30 year story".

Ken Forbus on "Student"

Ken Forbus talk about Danny's PhD work on the system Student. His title was "From STUDENT".

David Israel on Thoughts

David Israel on "Some Thoughts on Danny"

Mark Stefik on Initials

Mark Stefik (PARC) spoke on "What does  'DGB' stand for?"

Pat Hayes on `Following the Leader'

Patrick Hayes talked after Don Norman, in the PARC Auditorium, in 2008. A great title,
`Following the Leader', I  can almost hear the song.

Don Norman on DannyFest

Don Norman's talk was entitled "How does he always manage to make us do the work?".

Don has promised to send a paper for the new book. His title is ``Describing Danny".

Terry Winograd for DannyFest

Terry Winograd was traveling when we had DannyFest, but he sent a video tribute.

Videos of DannyFest?

The videos of DannyFest are on YouTube now. There is a whole channel,

Dannyfest. The one above is  Johan de Kleer's introduction to the event.

 http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgkIf-gHNvuDLL7WM00yDdItqPcbj_Q5o

DannyFest 2008 poster

A Book about Danny Bobrow's work

This blog is an attempt to organize our efforts to edit a tribute to Danny Bobrow's work.

In 2008 we (Johan de Kleer, Cleo Condoravdi and myself) organized  DannyFest, a celebration of Danny's multiple accomplishments in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science in general. At that stage a book was considered, but we were all too busy (I left PARC a few weeks after the party) to do it then.

Now we're trying to do it again. The old blog DannyFest still contains material about the festschrift, but most of the content will be migrating here, as fast as we can do it.

Anyone who wants to write a blog post is welcome, just write to one of the editors of the book, or leave a comment.