Ernest Davis: Academic Family Tree

Ancestors

Father (i.e. thesis advisor): Drew McDermott
Grandfather: Gerry Sussman
Great-grandfather: Marvin Minsky

For further ancestors, look at The Mathematics Genealogy Project, which traces this line back to Erasmus and beyond.

Descendants

Leora Morgenstern. "Foundations of a Logic of Knowledge, Action, and Communication."
- Lynn Andrea Stein
  - Ian Horswill
    - Jon Handler
    - Aaron Khoo
    - Magy Seif El-Nasr
      - Maha Al-Saati
      - Joseph Zupko
      - David Milam
      - Zhengxing Chen
      - Elin Carstensdottir
  - Ellen Spertus
  - Joanna Bryson
    - Emmanuel Tanguy
    - Mark Wood
    - Hagen Lehman
    - Bidan Huang
    - Daniel Taylor
    - Swen Gaudl
    - Yifei Wang
    - Jekaterina Novikova
    - Paul Rauwolf
    - Rob Wortham
    - Andreas Theodorou
Leo Joskowicz. "Reasoning about Shape and Kinematic Function in Mechanical Devices"
- Yaron Ostrovsky-Berman
- Eran Peleg
- Ruby Shamir
- Moti Freiman
- Yonatan Myers
- Lior Weizman
- Achia Kronman
- Assaf Spanier
- Refael Vivanti
Pasquale Caianiello. "Learning as the Evolution of Representation."
Alexander Botta. "A Theory of Natural Learning."
Jen-Lung Chiu. "Planning in an Imperfect World Using Previous Experiences."
Tim Klinger. "Adversarial Reasoning: A Logical Approach for Computer GO."
Gedas Adomavicius. "Expert-Driven Validation of Set-Based Data Mining Results" (nominal co-advisor with Alex Tuzhilin).
Ji-Ae Shin. ``TM-LPSAT: Encoding Temporal Metric Planning in Continuous Time.'' Now a book!
Tatiana Kichkaylo. (co-advisor with Vijay Karamcheti). ``Construction of Component-Based Applications by Planning.''
Ziyang Wang. ``Incremental Web Search: Tracking Changes in the Web.''
Paul Bethe. ``Advances in computer bridge: Techniques for a partial-information, communications-based game.''

Masters' Theses Supervised

Yanai Lehavi, ``Charlie: A Treaty Reinsurance Underwriter".
Kumar Shashi Prabh, ``Performance of BLACKBOX Planning System on a Hard Problem of Satisfiability", May 2001.
Paul Bethe, ``DTAC: A method for planning to claim in Bridge." May 2010. DTAC code is here
Azam Asl (NYU Poly), "A Qualitative Calculus for 3D Rotations," December 2011.
Emily Morton-Owens , "A tool for extracting and indexing spatio-temporal information from biographical articles in Wikipedia". May 2012. The link for Kivrin
Wei Peng, "Evaluating the commonsense reasoning abilities of pretrained language models". December 2019.
Phakphum Artkeuw, "Commonsense Reasoning in Multilingual Models: Benchmarking and Merging Approaches". May 2025.
Amardeep Kumar, "M-RAFT: Retriever Aware Finetuning of Multimodal LLM for Multimodal RAG Systems". May 2025.

Senior Thesis Supervised

Yuling Gu, "Towards detecting temporal relations implicitly conveyed in text". May 2020.
Jennifer Zhuoran Zeng, "Physical Reasoning in an Open World". May 2022.

My advisees are impressively international in terms of country of origin: USA (Leora, Tim, Paul, Emily), Mexico (Leo), Italy (Pasquale), Romania (Alex), Taiwan (Jen-Lung, Ziyang), China (Wei Peng), Singapore (Yuling), Korea (Ji-Ae), Russia (Tatiana), Israel (Yanai), India (Kumar, Amardeep), Iran (Azam), and Thailand (Phakphum).