The author is a well known A.I. person, who wrote some landmark papers in the field, and played a role in the production of some others. His masters thesis Planning for conjunctive goals [1] is one. He's also written other works such as How to do research at the MIT AI Lab [2] and How to think real good [3] (don't judge this by the title, he chose the name as a deliberate ironic allusion to a badly translated book).

[1] ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-802.pdf

[2] https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/41487

[3] https://meaningness.com/metablog/how-to-think