The AICML is currently led by its Centre's Scientific Director, Dr. Russ
Greiner, who significantly contributed to many of the AICML's successes.
Having worked in the field of Machine Learning for the past two decades,
Dr. Greiner has emerged as one of the leaders in this field.  His oft-cited
scientific contributions, both in the theoretical and empirical domains, have
appeared in over 100 refereed publications - most in leading journals and
conferences for ML, robotics, medicine and biology - and have resulted in a
number of best paper and poster awards at top tier conferences.  As just two
examples of his successful results: His system for analyzing brain tumors and
predicting their growth is recognized as being amongst the world's best; and
his work on budgeted learning (a novel approach to experiment design) has
stimulated many international research projects.
 
In addition to his scientific contributions, Dr. Greiner has made invaluable
contributions to training. He has, for example, established a weekly
Artificial Intelligence Seminar that attracts dozens of potential trainees
from the undergraduate, graduate and professional ranks, started programs
designed to attract pre-university students to computing science and
undergraduate students into higher level studies, presented and designed
courses in AI and ML, worked with many undergraduate summer students, and
supervised dozens of graduate students.  Many of his graduated students have
gone on to further studies at prominent universities, and others, to
employment at companies such as Google, Siemens, Yahoo and Chenomx (a company
he helped found).  Several of his students have won best paper prizes at
prestigious ML venues, and some of his students have expanded their work with
him into patents and new companies - for example, SelectSearch.  In 2002 he
managed to attract several major conferences to Edmonton, including the
world's largest conferences in AI (AAAI) and in Bioinformatics (ISMB) ---
bringing in over 3500 attendees.  Today, he is highly sought after for his
insights into ML, frequently serving on thesis committees and as an executive
member on conference committees and editorial boards, and providing interviews
in various media forums to increase public awareness of ML and AI.
Among other honors, he was awarded a McCalla Professorship in 2005 and a
Faculty Research Award in 2007, and was elected a Fellow of the AAAI
(Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) in 2007.