Short answers, pulled from the story.
Oliver Selfridge was a British-American mathematician and computer scientist born on the 10th of May 1926, widely recognized as a pioneer of modern artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception" and was one of eleven attendees at the 1956 Dartmouth workshop, considered the founding event of AI as an academic field.
The Pandemonium Architecture is a computational framework Selfridge introduced in his 1959 paper "Pandemonium: A Paradigm For Learning." It describes software agents called "demons" that record events, recognize patterns, and trigger further events based on those patterns; the idea later gave rise to aspect-oriented programming.
Oliver Selfridge was the grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges. His father was Harry Gordon Selfridge Jr., and his mother worked as a clerk at the family store.
OLIVER stands for On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder. J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor introduced the concept in their 1968 paper "The Computer as a Communication Device" and named it in honor of Oliver Selfridge.
Selfridge worked at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT (where he was Associate Director of Project MAC), Bolt Beranek and Newman, and GTE Laboratories, where he became Chief Scientist. He also served on the NSA Advisory Board for twenty years, chairing its Data Processing Panel, before retiring in 1993.
No. Selfridge studied as a graduate student under Norbert Wiener at MIT after earning his mathematics degree there in 1945, but he did not complete his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D. He was nonetheless elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991.