although new approaches have since been found, mcdermott turned to other areas of ai, such as vision and robotics, and began working on automated planning again. his work on planning focused on the "classical" case rather than on hierarchical task network planning. in 1990 he was named a fellow of the association for the advancement of artificial intelligence, one of the first group of fellows. in 1996 he (and hector geffner and blai bonet independently) discovered "estimated-regression planning", based on the idea of heuristic search with an estimator derived from a simplified domain model by reasoning backward ("regression") from the goal. the simplified version is obtained automatically from a full domain model by ignoring propositions deleted by actions. in 2000 he got interested in logic again because the development of the semantic web made it seem newly applicable. he did work on ontology translation and on semantic web services.