Austin Tate (born May 12, 1951, in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, England) is an emeritus professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.^[2,5] From 1985 to 2019, he served as Director of AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He completed a BSc at Lancaster University followed by an MSc and a 1975 PhD at the University of Edinburgh with the dissertation "Using Goal Structure to Direct Search in a Problem Solver" (http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/6650), associated with Donald Michie and Carla Gomes. He is known for his research in Artificial Intelligence, including contributions to AI Planning, applications of Artificial Intelligence, and collaborative systems in Virtual Worlds.^[4] A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) in the United Kingdom, he was named an AAAI Fellow in 1993, is connected with Margaret Tate, maintains a homepage at www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/, and is pictured in Austin-Tate-2009-2400x2400.jpg.

Tate was born on 12 May 1951 in Knottingley, West Yorkshire, UK. He completed his B.A. (Hons) in Computer Studies at Lancaster University from 1969 to 1972.^[2] He completed his postgraduate study in machine intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Donald Michie, from 1972 to 1975, and later earned a Master of Science degree in e-Learning at the University of Edinburgh from 2011 to 2012.

Selected publications by A. Tate include "Generating Project Networks" in the Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-77) (Cambridge, MA, USA, Morgan Kaufmann, 1977, pp. 888–893) and "O-Plan: The open planning architecture," co-authored with K. Currie in Artificial Intelligence (1991). In 2003, Tate, J. Levine, J. Dalton, and A. Nixon published "Task Achieving Agents on the World Wide Web" as Chapter 15 (pp. 431–458) of Spinning the Semantic Web, edited by D. Fensel, J. Hendler, H. Liebermann, and W. Wahlster (MIT Press). Later contributions in IEEE Intelligent Systems include Tate's "The 'Helpful Environment': Geographically Dispersed Intelligent Agents That Collaborate" (2006) and "I-Room: A Virtual Space for Intelligent Interaction" (2010), co-authored with Y. H. Chen-Burger, J. Dalton, S. Potter, D. Richardson, J. Stader, G. Wickler, I. Bankier, and C. Walton. Other publications include O-Plan Papers and I-X Papers.

Tate's awards and honours include being elected an AAAI Fellow in 1993 and becoming a Fellow of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) in 1998. In 1999, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and became a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI). He subsequently became a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) in 2000, a Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) in 2006, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2012.

External links regarding research include the AIAI Planning and Activity Management Group website, as well as AI planners such as Traverser, Interplan, Nonlin, O-Plan, and I-X/I-Plan. Featured example projects include AKT (Advanced Knowledge Technologies), CoAX (Coalition Agents eXperiment), FireGrid, OpenKnowledge, I-Room, and OpenVCE. Additional links include Ai Austin's website for his virtual world avatar, along with interests such as Austin Tate's Gerry Anderson Web Area, Supercar, and Fireball XL5.