Jon Palfreman
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Jon Palfreman
Jon Palfreman is a reporter, writer, producer, director and educator best known for his documentary work on ''Frontline'' and ''Nova''. He has won awards for his journalism, including the Peabody Award, Emmy Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, Writers Guild of America Award, and the AAAS-Westinghouse Science in Journalisim Award. Palfreman has written, directed and produced documentaries on a wide range of topics, but specializes in topical and often controversial issues involving science and medicine. Palfreman is the author of ''Brainstorms: The Race to Unlock the Mysteries of Parkinson's Disease'', ''The Case of the Frozen Addicts: Working at the Edge of the Mysteries of the Human Brain'' (with J. William Langston), and ''The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age'' (with Doron Swade). He is also president of the Palfreman Film Group. Background Palfreman was born in England. He studied physics and the history and philosophy of science while atte ...
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Peabody Award
The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, honor the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in television, radio, and online media. The awards were conceived by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1938 as the radio industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes. Programs are recognized in seven categories: news, entertainment, documentaries, children's programming, education, interactive programming, and public service. Peabody Award winners include radio and television stations, networks, online media, producing organizations, and individuals from around the world. Established in 1940 by a committee of the National Association of Broadcasters, the Peabody Award was created to honor excellence in radio broadcasting. It is the oldest major electronic media award in the United States. Final Peabody Award winners are selected unanimously by the prog ...
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Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious and highly ranked universities in the world. The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and other faculties offer only graduate degrees, including professional degrees. Harvard has three main campuses: the Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area. Harvard's endowment is valued at $50.9 billion, making it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Endowment inco ...
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Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathemati ...
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Maurice Wilkes
Sir Maurice Vincent Wilkes (26 June 1913 – 29 November 2010) was a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits. At the time of his death, Wilkes was an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cambridge. Early life, education, and military service Wilkes was born in Dudley, Worcestershire, England the only child of Ellen (Helen), née Malone (1885–1968) and Vincent Joseph Wilkes (1887–1971), an accounts clerk at the estate of the Earl of Dudley. He grew up in Stourbridge, West Midlands, and was educated at King Edward VI College, Stourbridge. During his school years he was introduced to amateur radio by his chemistry teacher. He studied the Mathematical Tripos at St John's College, Cambridge from 1931 ...
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John Mauchly
John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts, including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'' (1945) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946), influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world. Biography John W. Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907, to Sebastian and Rachel (Scheidemantel) Mauchly in Cincinnati, Ohio. He moved with his parents and sister, Helen Elizabeth (Betty), at an early age to Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Sebastian Mauchly obtained ...
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Konrad Zuse
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer. Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book (''Calculating Space''). Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany.
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Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), education (such as medical or military training) and business (such as virtual meetings). Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR, although definitions are currently changing due to the nascence of the industry. Currently, standard virtual reality systems use either virtual reality headsets or multi-projected environments to generate realistic images, sounds and other sensations that simulate a user's physical presence in a virtual environment. A person using virtual reality equipment is able to look around the artificial world, move around in it, and interact with virtual features or items. The effect is commonly created by VR headsets consisting ...
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Douglas Lenat
Douglas Bruce Lenat (born 1950) is the CEO of Cycorp, Inc. of Austin, Texas, and has been a prominent researcher in artificial intelligence; he was awarded the biannual IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1976 for creating the machine learning program, AM. He has worked on (symbolic, not statistical) machine learning (with his AM and Eurisko programs), knowledge representation, "cognitive economy", blackboard systems, and what he dubbed in 1984 " ontological engineering" (with his Cyc program at MCC and, since 1994, at Cycorp). He has also worked in military simulations, and numerous projects for US government, military, intelligence, and scientific organizations. In 1980, he published a critique of conventional random-mutation Darwinism. He authored a series of articles in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence exploring the nature of heuristic rules. Lenat was one of the original Fellows of the AAAI, and is the only individual to have served on the Scientific Advisory ...
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Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). ...
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Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy. Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award. Biography Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to an eye surgeon father, Henry, and to a mother, Fannie (Reiser), who was a Zionist activist. His family was Jewish. He attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and the Bronx High School of Science. He later attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. He then served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. His doctoral dissertation was titled "Theory of neural-analog reinforcement systems and its application to the brain- ...
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Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), President (corporate title), president and software architect, chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a major entrepreneur of the Home computer, microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Gates was born and raised in Seattle. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It became the world's largest personal computer software company. Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was Criticism of Microsoft, criticized for his bu ...
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Thomas Watson Jr
Thomas may refer to: People * List of people with given name Thomas * Thomas (name) * Thomas (surname) * Saint Thomas (other) * Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, and Doctor of the Church * Thomas the Apostle * Thomas (bishop of the East Angles) (fl. 640s–650s), medieval Bishop of the East Angles * Thomas (Archdeacon of Barnstaple) (fl. 1203), Archdeacon of Barnstaple * Thomas, Count of Perche (1195–1217), Count of Perche * Thomas (bishop of Finland) (1248), first known Bishop of Finland * Thomas, Earl of Mar (1330–1377), 14th-century Earl, Aberdeen, Scotland Geography Places in the United States * Thomas, Illinois * Thomas, Indiana * Thomas, Oklahoma * Thomas, Oregon * Thomas, South Dakota * Thomas, Virginia * Thomas, Washington * Thomas, West Virginia * Thomas County (other) * Thomas Township (other) Elsewhere * Thomas Glacier (Greenland) Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Thomas'' (Burton novel) 1969 novel ...
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