Daniel Huttenlocher

• 1. Introduction

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  Daniel Huttenlocher holds 24 patents in computer vision, a total reached by 2015 after decades of research. Yet his most widely read work carries two other names alongside his own. One is Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State. The other is Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google. In 2021, the three of them published a book together, The Age of A.I. And Our Human Future. How does a computer vision researcher end up in that kind of company? What path took him from a childhood shaped by two academic parents to a seat on Amazon's board? And how did that same path lead him to build a college from nothing at MIT?

• 2. Early Life And Education

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  Huttenlocher was born in 1959, the son of two academics at the University of Chicago. His father worked there as a neurologist at the University of Chicago Medical School. His mother taught cognitive psychology at the same university. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools before leaving the city for his undergraduate studies. His undergraduate degree came from the University of Michigan. Graduate school took him to MIT, where he earned his master's degree and, in 1988, his doctorate. Shimon Ullman supervised that doctoral work. That same training in vision science would carry him directly into his next move.

• 3. From Industry To Academia

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  Before Cornell, Huttenlocher worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a lab known simply as Xerox PARC. He also served as Chief Technology Officer at a company called Intelligent Markets. In 1988, he joined the department of computer science at Cornell University. His research there centered on computer vision, and that line of work built a growing body of patents over the years that followed. That same expertise soon put him in charge of a very different kind of institution.

• 4. Deanships And Board Seats

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  Cornell Tech named Huttenlocher its inaugural dean, a role that came with the title of vice provost at Cornell University. In 2016, Amazon named him to its board of directors, adding a corporate role alongside his academic one. Then, in February 2019, MIT announced that Huttenlocher would lead its new Schwarzman College of Computing. He took up that post as its inaugural dean starting in August 2019. By then, much of his research had shifted toward artificial intelligence, setting up a very different kind of project.

• 5. The Age Of A.I.

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  In 2023, Huttenlocher, Kissinger, and Schmidt reunited to write an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. They argued that the rise of artificial intelligence might rank in importance with the invention of the printing press. That claim echoed the argument the same three authors made in The Age of A.I. And Our Human Future. The book argued that advances in artificial intelligence stood to bring widespread change across human society. It also asked a harder question: whether people were ready for changes of that scale. Little, Brown and Company published the book in New York. By placing artificial intelligence in the same sentence as movable type, the three co-authors staked out one of the boldest comparisons made about the technology's likely reach.