v#' ■/ '■J1 A PROFILE OF EDWARD A. FEIGENBAUM, OFFERED IN CONNECTION WITH THE MCI COMMUNICATIONS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP AWARD FOR INNOVATION The profile of Edward Feigenbaum begins with his Curriculum Vitae, which is attached. Those facts indicate the dimensions of leadership that he has offered to innovation in information technology and the applications of computers. Briefly summarized, the dimensions of his leadership are: a. scientific and technological: pioneering in applied artificial intelligence, an information technology that has created important new applications of computers and that offers promise of major future gains in productivity and quality of work in the new economy of "knowledge workers/ the so-called post-industrial knowledge-based society. b. literary: i.e. "entrepreneuring" with the word, writing books to disseminate an understanding of the new developments to both lay and professional audiences. This also includes appearances on television and radio broadcasts, public lectures, and the making of an award-winning film. c. corporate: i.e. entrepreneuring in the usual sense of establishing companies to transfer the fruits of university basic research to industry and business. This also includes service on boards of large corporations. d. professional: serving his university, the national government, and his science in a variety of leadership positions. This also includes his role in helping to found the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and serving as its second president. HONORS For his scientific innovation and leadership, Feigenbaum has been accorded many honors. Among the most prominent are his election to the National Academy of Engineering and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; his honorary degree from Aston University in England; his election to fellow status in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Medical Informatics; and his Lee Kuan Yew Professorship, as well as his election to the Productivity Hall of Fame, in the Republic of Singapore. In 1991, the World Congress on Expert Systems established an achievement award in his honor, The Feigenbaum Medal, and made him the first recipient of this award. ABOUT FEIGENBAUM'S CAREER New technologies do not easily insert themselves into a society's business or social affairs. Champions are needed to facilitate the insertion. The big picture of Feigenbaum's role is as a champion of computer science and technology (in general) and of the science and technology of artificial intelligence (in particular). Feigenbaum was one of the first scientists in artificial intelligence research He was studying with Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon at Carnegie-Mellon University (1955) at the time of the birth of this science and did early pioneering work with Simon on computer self-learning. In those early years, the main focus of the science was on modeling processes of problem solving, and the main effort was directed toward "general problem solvers." In 1965, Feigenbaum began a collaboration with Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, the scientific fruits of which made a major paradigm shift in artificial intelligence research and practice, and led ultimately to the industrialization of the technology. They designed and built a program that performed at professional levels of problem solving in an area of physical chemistry (mass spectrometry), an important "real world" task. They quickly followed this with programs to solve other difficult problems of diagnostic medicine, molecular genetics, structural engineering, x-ray crystallography, and even submarine detection. Their work established the credibility of applied artificial intelligence. The key scientific result that led to a paradigm shift in the artificial intelligence field was this: knowledge of a specific domain of work (rather than the generality of the problem solving process) is the key to performance at high levels of competence in that domain of work. Experts are so good at what they do because they know a great deal about their 2 fields of work; likewise computers must have that knowledge if they are to serve people intelligently. Thus was born the concept and technology of the knowledge-based system, or the expert system (in fact, for this work, Feigenbaum is sometimes called "the father of expert systems"). The knowledge-based approach is today the major approach of artificial intelligence, and expert systems constitute by far the largest applications area of artificial intelligence. TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER, ENTREPRENEURSMANSHIP, AND BUSINESS By 1980, as the technology matured, Feigenbaum began his effort to transfer the technology to industrial use. He was co-founder of the first two start-up (venture) firms in applications of artificial intelligence (IntelliGenetics, later IntelliCorp; and Teknowledge). The work of Feigenbaum's university lab, plus the work of these firms, set the pattern for a software industry segment of considerable size. If one includes the investments of industrial firms and service industry businesses in developing expert system applications, the size of the industry segment is one to two billions of dollars annually worldwide. Tens of thousands of expert systems have been built. In 1988, Feigenbaum and two collaborators published a book, The Rise of the Expert Company, in which they documented the many economic benefits of expert systems technology, including enhancement of productivity of human problem solving and decision making (factors of ten to several hundred); cost savings to companies (in some cases in the tens of millions of dollars per year); and major improvements in the quality of human problem solving and decision making. Envisioning expert system applications in engineering design, in 1990 he co- founded another start-up firm, Design Power Inc.; it focuses on engineering applications in construction engineering. In 1983, Feigenbaum was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of Sperry Corporation, then one of the largest computer companies in the world. He continued this service until the Sperry takeover by Burroughs. He organized and chaired Sperry's Technology Advisory Board, and helped to put Sperry 3 on a path that made it a leading applier and supplier of artificial intelligence technology. Feigenbaum now serves on the Technology Advisory Board of a young computer company, Sequent Computer Corporation. He retains Board of Director memberships in IntelliCorp and Design Power Inc. BOOKS In 1979 Feigenbaum was awarded a distinguished visiting professorship at the University of Tokyo. What he learned and saw in Japan deeply impressed him. He saw the excellent Japanese technologists moving rapidly in all areas of computer technology, especially moving toward the "grand challenge," artificial intelligence. In 1983, Feigenbaum and McCorduck published The Fifth Generation, a book that discussed the Japanese challenge and the possible American responses to it. This widely read and widely discussed book became a best-seller. It was translated into many languages (including all the major European languages plus Chinese and Japanese) and sold more than half a million copies worldwide. As part of his effort to champion the science of artificial intelligence and make it understandable to a broad spectrum of engineers and scientists, he coordinated and edited an encyclopedia of artificial intelligence called The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, in four volumes. The Handbook has sold more copies (a surrogate measure for being widely read) than any other book in the history of the artificial intelligence field. His early book, Computers and Thought (1963), was the first book on artificial intelligence, and thereby helped to shape the emerging field. Subsequently, Feigenbaum served the publisher, McGraw-Hill, as founding editor of its Computer Science Series. MEDIA ATTENTION AND LECTURING Inevitably, the champion of an important new field of technology becomes the focus of attention in the media and in industry. Since 1983, Feigenbaum has appeared on dozens of television and radio shows discussing both artificial intelligence and the future of information technology. These appearances have been as far-flung as The Merv Griffin Show, the MacNeil- Lehrer News Hour, and BBC science productions. Most recently (April, 1991), 4 he appeared on the Smithsonian's national PBS production, "From Information to Wisdom." In the early 1980s, he and his laboratory staff did a film on the knowledge- based systems research they had pioneered. The film (with sound translated into Japanese) was chosen as a non-stop exhibit in the US Pavilion at the Tsukuba Science Expo in Japan. It was seen by millions of Japanese visitors to that science "world's fair," and subsequently won a "best film of the year" award for documentaries by the United States Information Agency. Feigenbaum has also appeared in many articles and interviews in newspapers and magazines, sometimes solo and sometimes with other prominent people in computer science and technology. Of the articles, perhaps the most broadly disseminated in this country were special features in Newsweek and in Fortune, the former dealing with the Japanese challenge in computers, the latter dealing with the field of artificial intelligence. Executive magazine ran a special biography and interview with him. San Francisco Focus magazine did a short feature on him in connection with a "scholars of the year" story. Abroad, long interviews of him were published in Le Monde and Der Spiegel.