Following his graduate work at MIT in 1972, Waltz became a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1984 he joined
Thinking Machines Corporation where he led the Knowledge Representation and Natural Language (KRNL) group. There, his access to massively parallel supercomputers enabled him to work on new methods for information retrieval involving comparisons to large amounts of data. With Craig Stanfill, he originated the field of memory-based reasoning branch of
case-based reasoning. His research interests also included massively parallel information retrieval, data mining, learning and automatic classification with applications protein structure prediction, and natural language processing and machine learning applications applied to the electric power grid. While at Thinking Machines, Waltz was also a Professor of Computer Science at
Brandeis University. In 1993 Waltz left Thinking Machines to join NEC Research Institute in Princeton, where he eventually rose to become President of NEC Research. Waltz joined
Columbia University in 2003 as the Director of the Center for Computational Learning Systems . Waltz served as president of the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) from 1997 to 1999 and is the former Chairman of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (SIGART). He was on the Advisory Board for IEEE Intelligent Systems, and the board of the
Computing Community Consortium of the
Computing Research Association, and
National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science Advisory Board. He was on the Army Research Lab Technical Advisory Board and the Advisory Board of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, the Technical Advisory Board of Cork Constraint Computation Center (4C), Ireland, and served on recent external advisory boards for
Rutgers University,
Carnegie Mellon University,
Brown University, and
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). == Awards ==