- Patrick Winston
Patrick Henry Winston is an American
computer scientist . Winston was director of theMIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for most of its existence, from1972 to1997 . He succeededMarvin Minsky , who left to found theMIT Media Lab shortly after establishing the AI Lab in the wake of the political upheavals at that time. He was succeeded byRodney Brooks after a long, stable period. Brooks went on to terminate the lab by merger into theMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).Winston's thesis work concerned the difficulty of learning; he concluded you could only learn something you nearly already know. He was a student of
Marvin Minsky . Currently, he is Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science at the MIT CSAIL. He is active in research and interested inmachine learning and human intelligence. Winston also teaches a heavily subscribed courses at MIT titled "The Human Intelligence Enterprise" which teaches AI and how to effectively communicate. Winston is known within the MIT community for his strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture. He is also an avid woodworker having made all the furniture in his office.Winston currently teaches 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston is also a (co-)author of a number of CS and AI textbooks, including:
* "Artificial Intelligence"
* "The Psychology of Computer Vision"
* "Lisp" (withBerthold K. P. Horn )
* "On to C"
* "On to C++"
* "On to Java" (withSundar Narasimhan )
* "On to Smalltalk"He is also an alumnus of Mass Gamma chapter of
Phi Delta Theta .External links
* [http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/index.html Personal homepage]
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