Peter Norvig
Born 1956 · Age 69
American computer scientist, co-author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach', long-time Google research leader, and Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
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Life & Career Timeline
Early interest in accuracy and language (sixth grade)
As a sixth grader Norvig wrote letters to his local newspaper complaining about innumeracy and sloppy language in science reporting, an early sign of his interest in language and accuracy.
BSc in Applied Mathematics, Brown University
Received a Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics from Brown University (Brown class noted as '78).
Worked at MIT spin-off (early career)
Spent two years working at an MIT-area spin-off after Brown before enrolling in a PhD program (period ~1978–1980).
Enrolled in Ph.D. program at UC Berkeley
After two years in industry he enrolled in UC Berkeley's computer science PhD program (approx. 1980).
Ph.D. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Awarded Ph.D.; dissertation titled 'A Unified Theory of Inference for Text Understanding'.
PhD thesis published
PhD thesis 'A Unified Theory of Inference for Text Understanding' (UC Berkeley).
Research & teaching roles at universities
Served as a research faculty member at UC Berkeley and as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (dates across late 1980s/early 1990s).
Research Scientist / Senior Research Scientist roles
Worked as a research scientist at Stanford University and as a senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories (listed roles around early 1990s).
Published 'Paradigms of AI Programming'
Published the book 'Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp' (highly regarded book on Lisp and AI programming).
Chief Designer at Harlequin Inc.
Served as chief designer at Harlequin Inc., working on commercial software and language-related tools.
Chief Scientist at Junglee
Became chief scientist at Junglee, an early web metasearch and comparison-shopping company (employee #8).
Built Junglee shopping tool / product milestone
Co-led a team that built a Java-based shopping tool that became Junglee's key product and later powered Yahoo Shopping.
Head / Division Chief, Computational Sciences, NASA Ames
Appointed head of the Computational Sciences Division (NASA Ames), overseeing ~200 scientists in autonomy, robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis.
Served on Mars '98 investigation boards
Served as the only computer scientist on both investigation boards for the two failed Mars '98 missions (investigations led to recommendations and subsequent success).
Junglee acquired by Amazon (company exit, approximate)
Junglee was acquired by Amazon.com; Junglee's shopping technology became part of larger e-commerce efforts (text references Junglee acquisition prior to Amazon).
Remote Agent flies on Deep Space 1; NASA Software of the Year
The Remote Agent experiment, developed under Norvig's division, flew on Deep Space 1; Remote Agent won NASA's 1999 Software of the Year award.
Published 'Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years' (popular essay)
Published a widely shared essay arguing programming expertise takes years, later translated into 20+ languages and read by millions.
Elected AAAI Fellow
Elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for contributions to education, NLP, web tech, and research leadership.
NASA Exceptional Achievement Award
Recipient of NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award (mentioned in Norvig short bio).
Joined Google
Began working at Google (has been there since 2001), eventually taking leadership roles in search quality and research.
Director of Search Quality, Google (start)
Became Director of Search Quality at Google; responsible for core web search algorithms during a period of ~twenty-fold growth.
Published 'Gettysburg Powerpoint' satire
Released the 2003 Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, a satire highlighting bad presentation practices; widely cited and republished.
AIMA 2nd edition published
Second edition of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach' (Russell & Norvig) published (the original text dates to 1995; book became the leading AI textbook).
Director of Research, Google (start)
Elevated to Director of Research at Google (starting in 2005), overseeing teams in machine translation, speech, vision and democratization of AI.
Elected ACM Fellow
Elected a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to AI and information retrieval.
UC Berkeley Distinguished Alumni Award
Received the distinguished alumni award from UC Berkeley (citation appears in Norvig short bio).
Published 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data' (IEEE)
Co-authored influential IEEE Intelligent Systems article with Halevy and Pereira arguing that large amounts of data and simple models often outperform complex models with less data.
Visiting Lecturer, Stanford University
Served as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University (listed in bios).
Co-taught online AI class (MOOC) with Sebastian Thrun
Co-taught 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence' (Oct–Dec 2011) — the class registered ~160,000 students worldwide and ~23,000 completed, helping launch the modern MOOC era.
TED Talk: 'A classroom with 100,000 students'
Gave a TED Talk in June 2012 describing the massive online AI class and lessons about online education.
Featured in Forbes profile on AI pioneers
Profiled by Forbes (Dec 2016) discussing Norvig's career, views on AI, and role at Google.
Stevens Institute Distinguished Lecture
Delivered 'Creating Software with Machine Learning: Challenges and Promise' (April 24, 2017) as part of Stevens President's Distinguished Lecture Series.
Life After Brown talk (Brown University)
Gave a public talk at Brown University titled 'Life After Brown: Past, Present, and Future' (Nov 17, 2017).
Asteroid Day profile / public outreach
Profiled on Asteroid Day website (bio highlights NASA, Google, teaching and fellowships).
O'Reilly & other public articles and talks
Published and spoke on topics including breadth of AI applications, software engineering for ML, and applying AI to cancer and other domains (multiple O'Reilly posts 2016–2018).
AIMA 4th edition (noted in sources as 2020 edition)
The fourth edition of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach' is cited (2020) as the continuing standard AI textbook (original 1995; multiple editions).
Distinguished Education Fellow, Stanford HAI
Named a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI (Norvig listed as Education Fellow at Stanford HAI).
AIMA adoption milestone (schools using book)
By 2022 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach' reported used by over ~1,400 schools globally (text is in widespread academic use).
Authored 'Data Science in Context' (to appear / noted)
Norvig's short bio notes a book 'Data Science in Context' listed to appear in 2022 (listed as publication forthcoming in short bio).
Open-source contributions (Pytudes, Course Builder) noted
Maintains popular open-source repositories: Pytudes (Python notebooks) and code for the AI textbook; Pytudes cited with ~18,000 GitHub stars in Norvig bio.
Wikipedia & public bios summary (current roles)
Public profiles (Wikipedia and others) list Norvig as Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford HAI and previously Google Director of Research and Search Quality.
Key Achievement Ages
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