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Annals of the Historyofcomputing :R « Annals of the HistoryofComputing :r Dr. John A. N. Editor-in-Chief Annals ofthe 1987-1995 Virginia Tech Wednesday, June 19, 1996 Department ofComputer Science. ry iyyy yy Blackburg, VA 24001-0106 Professor Edward Feigenbaum of Phone +1-703-231-5780 Department Computer Science Fax- + 1-703-231-6075 Stanford University [email protected] Stanford CA 94305 [email protected] Dear Dr. Feigenbaum: Re: "Computer Pioneers" In May 1995 the lEEE Computer Society Press published my book entitled "Computer Pioneers", a collection of the biographies of 240 pioneers in our industry. The first printing quickly sold out, and the second printing (with one or two corrections) was prepared for the 1996 50th Anniversary activities. I am working on the second edition, trying hard to include those whom I missed before and bringing the others up-to-date. I am enclosing the outline of an entry that I have constructed from the lEEE Spectrum, together with the biography of another pioneer from the first edition. I would be grateful if you would fill out the details for me, and return it to me so that I can include your name in the next edition. Also if you have a photograph, not necessarily a very recent one, I would appreciate receiving a copy. Upon receipt I will scan it into our system and return the original to you as soon as possible. The World's Computer Society DC 'end: Biographies LOS AL -MITOS, G. TOKYO. JAPAN yyyyy,5i11.;;:..] v. The Institute ot I lectrk.<l .m.l Electronics Engineers, lm WASHINGTON, Edward E. Feigenbaum Born 20 January 1936, Weehawken NJ; Originator and promoter of the Fifth Generation and father of expert systems. Educ: 8.5., Electrical Engineering, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1956; Ph.D., Industrial Administration, Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1960; Prof. Exp: Fulbright Research Scholar, Great Britain, 1959-60; Assistant Professor, Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley, 1960-64; Stanford University: Associate Computer Science, and Director, Computing Center, 1965-69, Professor of Computer Science, 1969-present, Chairman, Department of Computer Science, 1969-??; Founded two start-up companies — Technowledge and IntelliCorp; Chief Scientist, US Air Force, c 1993-present; Honors and Awards: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 19??; Fellow, AAAI; Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, 19??; Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics, 19??; DSc(Hon), Aston University, United Kingdom, 19??; Member, American Academy of Arts and Member, National Academy of Engineering, 1986 (for pioneering contributions to knowledge engineering and expert systems technology.) Ed Feigenbaum's contributions to computer science are many, but they are all part of a steadfast vision to make knowledgebased systems real and useful. More than any other person in the history of computing, Ed is identified with the simple phrase, "knowledge is power." The disparity, however, between the simplicity of saying it and the complexity of demonstrating it has occupied much of his professional life. His professional curriculum vitae provides only a little insight into his contributions. He received his PhD from Carnegie Tech in 1960. He has been a Rand Corp. consultant; an assistant, then associate, professor of business administration at UC Berkeley; a part of Stanford's new CS Department and AI Lab in 1965: and a member of Stanford's CS Department faculty since then. He organized the Heuristic Programming Project (HPP) at Stanford in the 1960s and has been its intellectual head for over 25 years. He has received numerous awards, including election to the National Academy of Engineering; fellowships in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the AAAI, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and the American College of Medical Informatics; an honorary doctorate from Aston University, in England; and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has volunteered more than his share of time to many organizations. He has been the chair of the Stanford CS Department, the president of the AAAI, and a member of the National Library of Medicine Board of Regents; and he has been on advisory committees to the NSF, ONR, ARPA. and others. He is currently on leave from Stanford to serve as chief scientist of the Air Force. Ed's dissertation research with Herb Simon was on an information-processing theory of verbal learning, containing a model of human memory, that was implemented in the Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer (EPAM) system. It was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of symbol manipulation to model human thought processes. As a psychological model, EPAM still stands. Ed was a major contributor in the implementation of IPL-V, the first major language designed explicitly for symbol manipulation. As part of the Newell-Simon constellation of early stars, Ed shared the vision that computers Professor, Sciences, 19??; need to reason with symbols, not just calculate with numbers, partly because representing the world as numbers and numeric relations loses touch with our understanding of what we are thinking. Thus, not long after FORTRAN made "formula translation" easier for mathematical operations, IPL-V introduced similarly easy ways of information processing. He was director of the Stanford Computation Center in the days of 05360. After that, he worked with Joshua Lederberg to establish the Sumex-AIM resource at Stanford, which provided access to a firstrate time-sharing environment and to the ARPAnet for medical computing researchers around the country. They thereby created one of the first network-based national collaborative laboratories. With Lederberg, Ed initiated a long-term project that used knowledge of chemistry, plus heuristic search, as the organizing elements of Dendral, a program that interpreted mass spectroscopy data in organic chemistry. Although I got to know Ed in 1964 at the Rand Corp., the Dendral project was our first substantial collaboration and the place where the "knowledge theme" began to take shape. Dendral was the first attempt to automate scientific inference, the first to rely on textbook and experts' knowledge of a scientific domain, and the first to represent such knowledge in an explicit and modular fashion. While most other AI researchers focused on resolution theorem proving and Ed argued for an alternative paradigm that empowered weak reasoning methods through access to large amounts of knowledge. The Dendral project's experimental style was also different from much prevailing AI research. Instead of beginning with a model of how scientific inference was done (or ought to be done), we implemented concepts and methods that appeared sufficient for the program to perform well. We tested them against hard cases and re-engineered the program when necessary. Working upward from the details, we generalized the methods that seemed to have the most leverage. Ed has carried one consistent message to many corners of the computing world: computers will be more useful when they know more. He has argued for an engineering approach to the question of knowing: encode the same kinds of facts and relations that experts use in solving problems so that a computer can use them, and that's sufficient. These are the fundamental principles of that class of programs known as expert systems. They have been one of the most visible commercial successes of AI, but they have also substantially influenced research. Allen Newell, a former Turing Award winner, wrote in 1985, There is no doubt ... that the development of expert systems is the major advance in the field [of Al] during the last decade.... The emergence of expert systems has transformed the enterprise of AI, not only because it has been the main driver of the current wave of commercialization of AI, but because it has set the major scientific problems for AI for the next few years ... [Bobrow & Hayes, 1985] Ed's efforts to transfer this new technology to business, engineering, professional, and military applications have been persistent, visible, and effective. Not only was he a founder of the first, and subsequently more than one. expert systems company, he has also energetically advocated applications of AI through consulting, lecturing, and writing. In 1964, he edited (with Julian Feldman) the first book describing running AI programs, Computers and Thought. His four-volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence Ccoedited with Arron Barr and Paul Cohen) was the first collection of information about AI intended for programmers and others outside of AI who needed a practical, engineering-style handbook more than a collection of research articles. His book (with Pamela McCorduck and H. Penny Nii), The Rise of the Expert Company, was a direct message to the commercial world that computers using specialized knowledge can have an enormous impact on the bottom line. Ed's vision of intelligent machines and their impact has guided a substantial body of research and applications work and has influenced countless students of computer science. It moves somewhat beyond Turing's vision of intelligent machines by prescribing a means for achieving the goal: represent and use real-world knowledge, and lots of it. —Bruce G. Buchanan University of Pittsburgh 1 Quotations [Knowledge] is power, and computers that amplify that knowledge will amplify every dimension of power. Bibliography Biographical Bobrow, D.G. and P.J. Hayes. March 1985. "Artificial Intelligence: Where Are We?" Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 25, No. 3, p. 385. Buchanan, B.G. Feb. 1995. "The Turing Award Winners' Contributions to Computer Science: Edward A. Feigenbaum", lEEE Expert, pp. 68-69. Caddes, Carolyn. 1986. Portraits of Success: Impressions of Silicon Valle Pioneers. Tioga Publishing Co., Palo Alto CA. Significant Publications Feigenbaum, E. A. and Julian Feldman 1963. Computers and Thought. McGraw- Hill, New York. Current Address: Department of Computer Science Stanford University Stanford CA 94305 Chief Scientist, USAF Ph: (703) 697-7842 FAX: (703) 697-5154 E-mail: [email protected] * Reprinted with permission.
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