astronomy

Mary-Anne Williams

Mary-Anne Williams is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mary-Anne Williams rather than just read about it. In short: Mary-Anne Williams is an Australian researcher who is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia where she is based in the UNSW Business School. Her research focuses on AI and Innovation, and she is sought after thought-leader by industry and government.

Key takeaways

Mary-Anne Williams belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mary-Anne Williams to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mary-Anne Williams from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mary-Anne Williams is an Australian researcher who is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia where she is based in the UNSW Business School. Her research focuses on AI and Innovation, and she is sought after thought-leader by industry and government. She is founder and director of the UNSW Business AI Lab and deputy director of the UNSW AI Institute. Williams serves on the Defence Trailblazer Advisory Board and the Australian SKA Regional Centre (Square Kilometer Array Telescope) Board, and the Advisory Boards of Kit (a Commonwealth Bank company), CipherStash an innovative startup, and several Journal Editorial boards. Williams was previously a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and served as Director of the UTS Magic Lab from 2002 to 2020. She founded the UTS Magic Lab, an artificial intelligence and robotics research laboratory that collaborated closely with industry and involved undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral researchers. Research teams from the laboratory participated in international AI and robotics competitions as part of their work in autonomous systems and machine learning research. At UNSW Williams works with staff, students, alumni and the broader innovation community to grow innovation and entrepreneurship across the University and accelerate innovative thinking in Australia. Williams is a leader in Artificial Intelligence with transdisciplinary expertise in Cognitive Science, Disruptive Technologies, Digital Transformation, Business and Law. She is listed among Robohub's "Top 25 Women in Robotics", and celebrated on the First International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Williams is a Fellow of AAAI (the global body for Artificial Intelligence) alongside key figures like John McCarthy (computer scientist) who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, founded the Stanford AI Lab and has a joint publication with Williams; Marvin Minsky (early AI pioneer MIT), Edward Feigenbaum inventor of Expert Systems, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio. Also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society (FACS), Fellow and Affiliated Faculty at CODEX at Stanford University. Williams was the first woman President of KR Inc (2004-2006) the peak body for knowledge representation and reasoning, a foundational area for AI. She has served on numerous boards and advisory groups including KR Inc, the Innovation Reference Group with the South Western Sydney Local Area Health District, the Digital Transformation and the AI Preparedness Committees at ATSE, and invited to join the selection committee for the by then President of the ACM Vint Cerf. Williams has been an invited speaker at major events including the 2025 Stanford FutureLaw, 2025 AI and Education Conference, 2025 AI Summit in Financial Services, 2024 InsureTechLIVE, 2025 and 2024 SXSW Sydney, 2024 AI in Space, 2022 World Expo, 2022 APAC Open Data Science Conference, 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction, 2020 Strategic Management Society Conference on Designing the Future at Berkeley, 2019 Academy of Marketing Science, United Nations WSIS Forum on the Impact of AI, 2016 World Science Festival, and Australian Strategic Policy Institute. She shared her views on the impact of AI on Human Rights during a panel at the Australian Human Rights Commission Technology Conference. Williams focuses on Innovation and works on AI, Decision Making models, Human-AI collaboration, AI safety and law. She leads a partnership with the South Western Sydney Local Health District, the Softbank Social Robotics Partnership and the partnership with the Commonwealth Bank in Social Robotics. She discussed the impact of Artificial Intelligence on compassion and human rights with the Dalai Lama in Sydney in June 2018. Williams has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and a Master of Laws (LLM). She is co-founder of the Stanford AI Policy Hub. From 2003–2020 Professor Williams led the UTS Unleashed!Team to become RoboCup World Champions in Social Robotics 2019–2022. The team was the Australian Champion and Top International team in 2004. It won the Human–Robot Interface Award in 2017. In 2018 the RoboCup Team won the Tour Guide Challenge with the highest score of any team on any test in the history of the Social Robotics League. In 2019 her Research Team won the Social Robotics League at RoboCup 2019. The team had more female representation than all the other teams in the Social Robotics League combined, highlighting the breadth of her impact in robotics and her commitment to developing a new generation of leaders. Williams has made foundational contributions to the field of Decision Making using insights, methods and techniques from belief revision. Belief Revision is a fundamental area in Artificial Intelligence. It provides representations, models and mechanisms for computers to develop a set of beliefs and to revise them over time as they receive new information. Belief Revision plays a critical role in Explainable Artificial Intelligence: it allows AI systems to generate explanations of their behaviour that help humans interpret, understand, predict, and, importantly, trust AI systems. Over the last three decades, Williams has provided solutions to several longstanding open research problems in decision-making related to finite representations of beliefs, computational belief revision mechanisms, and the relevance of changes and explanations. She developed the first computational models and anytime algorithms for Belief Revision Operators to be applied to real-world problems. Anytime algorithms have an important feature for real-world applications: the more time they have, the better their outcomes. Not all algorithms have this feature; for example, venturing down fruitless decision/search tree branches usually means backtracking to a weaker outcome. Doctoral lineage Norman Foo, University of Michigan; Bernard P. Zeigler University of Michigan; John Henry Holland University of Michigan Arthur Burks University of Michigan and Princeton; John von Neumann, Princeton

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mary-Anne Williams

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mary-Anne Williams claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mary-Anne Williams before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mary-Anne Williams ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mary-Anne Williams

In research: Mary-Anne Williams appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mary-Anne Williams in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mary-Anne Williams is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Academic staff of the University of New South Wales, Alumni of the University of Edinburgh, Alumni of the University of Oxford, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mary-Anne Williams outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mary-Anne Williams in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mary-Anne Williams means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mary-Anne Williams out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mary-Anne Williams in simple terms?

Why does Mary-Anne Williams matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mary-Anne Williams?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mary-Anne Williams.