Congratulations to Professor Arthur C. Graesser of the University of Memphis, who was awarded the IAIED Lifetime Achievement Award at the AIED 2021 Conference this July. This is the second IAIED Lifetime Achievement Award, where the first was awarded to Professor John Self in 2018.

Art has been a leader in AI for Education for over three decades and has served the IAIED Society in many roles over that period, including as President from 2007-2009. He is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis and he is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego. His research contributions have been fundamental to dialog-based intelligent tutoring systems, knowledge representation, question asking and answering, human tutoring, text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, reading, education, memory, emotions, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and learning technologies with animated conversational agents.

Dr. Graesser has published over 500 articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings. He served as editor of the journal Discourse Processes (1996–2005) and Journal of Educational Psychology (2009-2014) and also as presidents of the Empirical Studies of Literature, Art, and Media (1989-1992), the Society for Text and Discourse (2007-2010) and the FABBS Foundation (2012-13).

We would like to thank Art for all of his contributions, and look forward to his continued research, service, and camaraderie in the years that follow.