- Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky is here critical of many current researchers in artificial intelligence researchers who he feels have gotten bogged down in theories of machine learning. He sees this as a crisis point in a time of an aging population that he feels will need help in performing many tasks. "We have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, but we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case."
- Alan Turing
This short on-line biography of Alan Turing is based on the entry I wrote for the British Dictionary of National Biography in 1995. The eight parts correspond roughly to the eight sections of my full biography Alan Turing : the enigma. There are no hyperlinks in the text. For links and for more images, go to the corresponding page of the Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook. Part 8 - Alan Turing 's Crisis
- John McCarthy
John McCarthy (born September 4, 1927, in Boston, Massachusetts, sometimes known affectionately as Uncle John McCarthy), is a prominent computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence. He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. McCarthy championed mathematical logic for Artificial Intelligence.
- Peter Norvig
Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is currently the Director of Research (formerly Director of Search Quality) at Google Inc.. He is a Fellow and Councilor of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach", now the standard college text.
- Rodney Brooks
Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003 until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Rollo Carpenter
Rollo Carpenter is the British-born creator of Jabberwacky, a learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatterbot that models, in part, the way humans learn. Carpenter has worked as CTO of a business software startup in Silicon Valley, but returned to the UK to work at Icogno. As Managing Director of Icogno Ltd, Carpenter is developing AI for entertainment, companionship and communication. His AI entries George and Joan were #1 for Loebner Prize (2005) and (2006).
- Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic. He is best known for his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" (abbreviated as "GEB") which was published in 1979, and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
- Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.
- David Levy
David Neil Lawrence Levy (b. March 14 1945), in London, is a Scottish International Master chess player and businessman, celebrated for his involvement with computer chess, the Computer Olympiads (founder), and the Mind Sports Olympiads (founder). He has written more than 40 books on chess and computers. In 1972, at the Skopje Chess Olympiad, he played Board 1 for the Scottish team.
- Wolfgang Wahlster
Wolfgang Wahlster is a German Artificial Intelligence researcher. He is CEO and Scientific Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and full professor in computer science at Saarland University, Saarbrücken. He was awarded the "Deutscher Zukunftspreis" ("German Future Award") in 2001 and is member of the Class for Engineering Sciences of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
- Hans Moravec
Hans Moravec (born November 30 1948 in Austria) is a research professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in machine vision for determining the region of interest (ROI) in a scene.
- Allen Newell
Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. He contributed to the Information Processing Language (1956) and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957) (with Herbert Simon).
- Nick Bostrom
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at the University of Oxford known for his work on the anthropic principle. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics (2000). In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as cloning, artificial intelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, and the simulation argument.
- Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins (born June 1, 1957 in Huntington, New York) is the founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time and has founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and published "On Intelligence" describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain.
- Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert (born March 1, 1928 Pretoria, South Africa) is an MIT mathematician, computer scientist, and prominent educator. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo programming language.
- Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum (Berlin, January 8, 1923) is a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT. Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, emigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 in the US, but his studies were interrupted by the war, during which he served in the military. Around 1950 he worked on analog computers, and helped create a digital computer for Wayne State University.
- Greg Egan
Greg Egan (August 20, 1961, Perth, Western Australia) is an Australian computer programmer and science fiction author. Egan specialises in hard science fiction stories with mathematical and quantum ontology themes, including the nature of consciousness. Other themes include genetics, simulated reality, mind transfer, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the superiority of rational materialism over religion.
- Daphne Koller
Daphne Koller is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. Her general research area is artificial intelligence. Koller was featured in an article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian Machine Learning. Koller completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern, …
- Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey, Ph.D., (born 20 April 1963 in London, England) is a controversial biomedical gerontologist who lives in the city of Cambridge, UK. He is working to expedite the development of a cure for human aging, a medical goal he refers to as engineered negligible senescence. To this end, he has identified what he concludes are the seven areas of the aging process that need to be addressed medically before this can be done.
- Anders Sandberg
Anders Sandberg (born July 11 1972) is a science debater, futurist, transhumanist, and author. He holds a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University and is currently postdoctoral research assistant for the Oxford group of the EU ENHANCE Project at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute (Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University). He is co-founder of and writer for the think tank Eudoxa.
- Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program. SHRDLU was written in the years from 1968-70. In making the program Winograd was concerned with the problem of providing a computer with sufficient "understanding" to be able to use natural language.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (born in 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the Singularity, and an advocate of Friendly Artificial Intelligence. Yudkowsky is a co-founder and research fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI). Yudkowsky is the author of the SIAI publications "Creating Friendly AI" (2001) and "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence" (2002).
- Tim Finin
Tim Finin is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). He has over 30 years of experience in the applications of Artificial Intelligence to problems in information systems, intelligent interfaces and robotics and is currently working on the theory and applications of intelligent software agents, the semantic web, and mobile computing. He holds degrees from MIT and the University of Illinois.
- James Hendler
James Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and one of the originators of the Semantic Web.
- Frank van Harmelen
Frank van Harmelen is a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. His research interests include artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and the semantic web. In 1989, van Harmelen received his Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh for his dissertation on meta-level reasoning. His adviser was Alan Bundy.
- Raymond Kurzweil
Raymond Kurzweil (pronounced:) (born February 12, 1948) is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity, and futurism.
- Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl is a computer scientist and statistician, best known for his prominent work on the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence, and in particular on Bayesian networks (see the article on belief propagation).
- Luc Steels
Luc Steels is a Belgian scientist, and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is also heading the SONY Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Steels, along with Rodney Brooks (his one-time office mate), was one of the initiators of the behaviour-based robotics approach to artificial intelligence and is closely linked to artificial life.
- Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929) is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.
- Vasant Honavar
Vasant Honavar is an American computer scientist, specializing in artificial intelligence. He received his Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked with Leonard Uhr. Vasant Honavar is a professor of Computer Science at Iowa State University. He heads the Iowa State University Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory. He is the founding director of the Iowa State University Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery.
- Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress (born Nancy Anne Koningisor in Buffalo, New York on January 20, 1948) is an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning novella "Beggars in Spain" in 1990. Kress pens a regular column for "Writer's Digest". She grew up in East Aurora, New York and attended college at SUNY Plattsburgh.
- Andy Clark
Andy Clark is a Professor of Philosophy and chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Before this he was director of the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Previously, he taught at Washington University at St. Louis and the University of Sussex in England. Professor Clark’s papers and books deal with the philosophy of mind and he is considered a leading scientist in mind extension.
- Roger Schank
Dr. Roger C. Schank , FAAAI is one of the world's leading researchers in AI, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments. He is President and CEO of Socratic Arts , a company whose goal is to to design and implement low-cost story-based learning by doing curricula in schools, universities, and corporations. Socratic Arts works with universities and corporations to develop customized degree and certificate programs.
- Selmer Bringsjord
Selmer Bringsjord is the chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is also a professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science. He conducts research in Artificial Intelligence as the director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). He claims to have "an argument for" P = NP using digital physics.
- Stuart J. Russell
Stuart Russell (born 1962) is a computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence. Stuart Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He received his B.A. with first-class honours in Physics from Oxford University in 1982, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently Professor and Chair of Computer Science.
- Donald Michie
Donald Michie was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher.
- Sean Williams
Sean Llewellyn Williams (born 1967) is a New York Times best selling science fiction author who lives in Adelaide, Australia. He is the author of over sixty published short stories and eighteen novels, including the Books of the Change and (with Shane Dix) the bestselling Evergence and Orphans trilogies. He has co-written three books in the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series and is a multiple recipient of both the Ditmar & Aurealis Award.
- Raj Reddy
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy (born June 13, 1937 in Katoor, India, near Chennai) is a world-renowned researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction. After his undergraduate studies at the College of Engineering, Guindy (now part of Anna University) in 1958, he did a master's degree in Civil Engineering at the University of New South Wales, and a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in 1966.
- Karl Schroeder
Karl Schroeder (born September 4, 1962) is a Canadian author. He was born into the Mennonite community in Brandon, Manitoba, and now lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter. An author of far-future science fiction, Schroeder claims to present novel philosophical speculations in his work. One of his concepts, known as "thalience" has gained modest currency in the artificial intelligence and computer networking communities.
- Hugo de Garis
Hugo de Garis (born 1947, Sydney, Australia) is a researcher in the sub-field of artificial intelligence known as evolvable hardware which involves evolving neural net circuits directly in hardware to build artificial brains. He is more recently notorious for his view of the eventual dominance of Artificial Intelligence over human intelligence, which has sparked debate and criticism, particularly among the more media-friendly members of the AI research community.