Curated playlist
American artificial intelligence researchers
- Paul WerbosPaul Werbos completed a doctoral dissertation in 1974 that contained the first formal description of training artificial neural networks through backpropagation of errors. For years, the work attracted little attention. He was not a…
- John SchulmanJohn Schulman was in seventh grade when he became fixated on BattleBots. The television program featured combat between remote-controlled robots, and it set off what he described as his first experience of self-directed learning. He read…
- Eliezer YudkowskyEliezer Yudkowsky was born on the 11th of September, 1979, the grandson of agricultural geneticist Morris Soller. He never attended high school or college. Raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew, he is now secular. A 2023 op-ed he wrote for Time…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Lee Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, and the computers of his era had almost no memory to spare. Working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, Samuel faced a problem that would define the rest of the century: how do…
- Terry WinogradTerry Allen Winograd was born on the 24th of February 1946, and he would go on to become one of computing's most quietly influential figures. He is a professor at Stanford University, co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction…
- Andrew NgAndrew Yan-Tak Ng was born in London on the 18th of April 1976, to a hematologist father and an arts administrator mother who had both immigrated from Hong Kong. Before he was a teenager, his family had already moved twice: first back to…
- Ray KurzweilRay Kurzweil was born on the 12th of February 1948 in Queens, New York City, to parents who had fled Austria just before World War II. By the time he was twelve years old, he had already taught himself to work with computers at a moment…
- Ray SolomonoffRay Solomonoff was born on the 25th of July 1926 in Cleveland, Ohio, and by the time he was 16 years old, he had already set himself an extraordinary task: to find a general method for solving mathematical problems. Not a specific problem,…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- Frank RosenblattFrank Rosenblatt died on the 11th of July, 1971 - his 43rd birthday - in a boating accident on Chesapeake Bay. It was the same date he was born, in 1928, in New Rochelle, New York. That strange symmetry frames a life that was itself full…