After completing his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, Howard received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University in 1992, under the supervision of Nick Cercone (who is himself a past winner of the Distinguished Service Award). Howard is now a faculty member at the University of Regina, where his research interests include knowledge discovery in databases, data mining, machine learning, computer animation, and temporal representation and reasoning. Howard served as the Treasurer on the Executive Board of CAIAC (then known as the CSCSI) for seven years and has provided invaluable guidance to his successors in that position. He was also the program co-chair and proceedings editor for the AI-2000 conference, and served as the General Chair for AI/GI/CRV/IS 2008. He was a guest editor for a special issue and has been a member of the editorial board for the Computational Intelligence journal, which has always been edited from Canada. Howard served on an NSERC Grant Selection Committee for Discovery and RTI grants for three years, including one year as Chair. He is currently serving on an NSERC Panel for selecting Strategic Project Grants. In 1994, Howard co-founded the TIME workshop series, the premier conference on temporal representation and reasoning, and consulted with all organizers extensively until TIME 2000. He has also been a long-time program committee member for a variety of conferences in data mining and AI, including of course the Canadian AI conference. Howard is well-known for his extremely thorough reviews and his ability to ask excellent questions of presenters.