Patrick Winston
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Patrick Henry Winston | |
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Born | Peoria, Illinois, U.S. | February 5, 1943
Died | July 19, 2019 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. | (aged 76)
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | MIT (BS 1965, MS 1967, PhD 1970) [1] |
Awards | IJCAI Computers and Thought Award |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Artificial Intelligence Computer Science |
Thesis | Learning Structural Descriptions from Examples (1970) |
Doctoral advisor | Marvin Minsky |
Doctoral students | David Waltz Philip Greenspun |
Website | Personal homepage |
Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab. Winston was succeeded as director by Rodney Brooks.
Winston received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1965, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and went on to complete his Masters and PhD there as well, finalizing his PhD in 1970. Winston's thesis work with Marvin Minsky concerned the difficulty of learning; he concluded it was only possible to learn something one nearly already knows. His research interests included machine learning and human intelligence. Winston was known within the MIT community for his excellent teaching and strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture. [citation needed]
At MIT, Winston taught 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston's How to Speak talk was an MIT tradition for over 40 years. "Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules."[2]
Winston also authored a number of computer science and AI textbooks, including:
- Artificial Intelligence ISBN 0201533774
- The Psychology of Computer Vision ISBN 0070710481
- Lisp (with Berthold K.P. Horn) ISBN 0201083191
- On to C ISBN 020158042X
- On to C++ ISBN 0201580438
- On to Java (with Sundar Narasimhan) ISBN 0201725932
- On to Smalltalk ISBN 0201498278
Winston died in Boston on July 19, 2019.[3]
References
- ^ CV of Winston
- ^ Winston, Patrick. "How to Speak". MIT OpenCourseWare. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
- ^ Conner-Simons, Adam; Gordon, Rachel (July 19, 2019). "Professor Patrick Winston, former director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, dies at 76" (Press release). MIT.
External links
- Personal homepage
- Memorial website
- Winston, Patrick. "How to Speak". MIT OpenCourseWare. Retrieved 11 August 2020 – via YouTube.
- Template:Worldcat id
- Oral History with Patrick H. Winston, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
- 1943 births
- 2019 deaths
- Scientists from Illinois
- Writers from Peoria, Illinois
- Artificial intelligence researchers
- Cognitive scientists
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
- MIT School of Engineering alumni
- Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- History of artificial intelligence
- American computer scientists
- Lisp (programming language) people
- Presidents of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Computer specialist stubs