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DR. PETER NORVIG
Peter Norvig, Ph.D., FAAAI, FACM is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since
2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, which means
he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries
than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the
American Association for Artificial
Intelligence and the Association for
Computing Machinery and coauthor of Artificial
Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the
field (with 94% market share).
Previously Peter was the head of the Computational Sciences Division
at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer
scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in
2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of
Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of
California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he
earned a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006.
He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software
Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming:
Case Studies in Common Lisp,
Verbmobil:
A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help
Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the
Gettysburg Powerpoint
Presentation and
the world's longest
palindromic sentence.
MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Google: Web search. Google was already a success when
he
arrived in 2001, so most of the credit goes to those who were there
before him. But as Director of Search Quality from 2002-2005 it was
his
responsibility to maintain and improve the quality of their web search
results during a time of ten-fold growth and increased scrutiny from
webmasters, the public, and the press. Throughout this all, Google
has maintained the lead over all competitors. As Director of Research
(in 2005) he oversees the world's top Machine
Translation team and is helping to build top groups in speech
understanding and other areas.
- NASA: Remote Agent and Mars Exploration Rovers.
His
division developed the Remote Agent
experiment that flew on the Deep
Space 1 spacecraft. This
was the first use of autonomous planning, scheduling, and fault
identification onboard a spacecraft. It won the 1999 NASA Software of
the Year award and was cited in two AAAI Presidential addresses (by
Nils Nilsson and by Ron Brachman) as one of the top achievements in
the history of AI. The Remote Agent also served as a proving ground
for some of the automated planning software that his team brought to
the tremendously succesful Mars Exploration
Rovers, or MER (which flew after he left NASA).
He also served as the only computer scientist on the investigation
boards for the two failed Mars '98 missions. President Clinton commented
on these boards that "I think the important thing is that, from our
point of view, NASA responded in an honest, up-front way to their
difficulties with the two Mars probes that didn't work so well ...
and I would like to see their budget increase now." The
investigation boards may or may not have been a cause for the
succesful MER missions, but they were certainly a prerequisite.
- Artificial Intelligence: A Modern
Approach. With
Stuart Russell, coauthor of what has been the leading textbook in AI
since 1995, with over 200,000 copies sold and over 2500
citations.
This book was also cited by AAAI President Brachman as a key
development in the history of AI.
- Junglee: Comparison ads and shopping site. He was
employee #8 at Junglee, one of the first web metasearch sites for
classified ads and shopping. He was responsible for maintaining the
algorithms, dictionaries and grammar rules for text-based extraction.
He then co-led a small team that produced a second-generation
development environment (in Java instead of Perl), and built the
shopping tool that became the Yahoo Shopping site,
and thereafter Junglee's most important product line, prior to
their acquisition by Amazon.com.
- Paradigms of AI Programming. This book
has been called
"The best book on programming ever written".
That is a subjective opinion, but there is a consensus that this is one
of the 3 or 4 top
books on Lisp programming.
- Open source software. In addition to the
commercial software he's
helped develop at Google, Junglee, and elsewhere, he's also donated
open
source software that has had an impact:
- Peter developed JScheme
(nee SILK), a Scheme implemented in Java, that has been used by
over
1,000
students and many professionals. Tim Hickey and the late Ken Anderson
took over most of
the development after the initial versions.
- His implementation of Prolog in Lisp from
PAIP served as the basis for
professional versions offered by Franz
Inc. and
Lispworks.
- His natural
language parser from PAIP was used in Cyc
and several other projects.
Read
The Future of Search:
The head of Google Research talks about his group's projects.
Listen to Peter on
The Future And You.
Print bio!
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