Helen Chan Wolf is an

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 r ...

pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and

Shakey the robot Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down ...

, the world's first autonomous robot, at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

Career

In the early 1960s Wolf worked with

Charles Bisson Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was "f ...

and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research on teaching computers to recognise human faces (so-called automated facial recognition). Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition. These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process around forty pictures an hour. Wolf joined the

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 r ...

group at

(then Stanford Research Institute) in 1966. At the

SRI Shri (; , ) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific. The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Marathi, Malay (including Indonesian and Malaysian), Javanes ...

Chan was part of the ''Application of Intelligent Automata to Reconnaissance'' project. Here she worked on

, the world's first mobile autonomous robot, which was honoured by an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Milestone in 2017. Shakey used

, making its own plans, navigating between places and improving through learning. Wolf developed the algorithms that extracted coordinates from images. Before Shakey, there were no efforts to integrate

and robotics into a single moving vehicle.

Selected publications

Her publications include: * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wolf, Helen Chan Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American roboticists Women roboticists American women computer scientists 20th-century American women scientists 21st-century American women scientists