Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin () (born March 23, 1959) is a retired computer scientist and the inventor of the

Lycos Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walth ...

web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on

natural-language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

, autonomous information agents,

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...

, and

expert system In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if� ...

s. He is also one of the authors of ''

Rog-O-Matic Rog-O-Matic is a bot developed in 1981 to play and win the video game ''Rogue'', by four graduate students in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh: Andrew Appel, Leonard Hamey, Guy Jacobson and Michael Loren ...

'' and ''Julia'', a

Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine's ability to artificial intelligence, exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing propos ...

competitor in the

Loebner Prize The Loebner Prize was an annual competition in artificial intelligence that awards prizes to the computer programs considered by the judges to be the most human-like. The prize is reported as defunct since 2020. The format of the competition was tha ...

Verbot The Verbot (Verbal-Robot) was a popular chatterbot program and Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows and the web. Early beginning virtual personalities, Inc. traces its technology back to Michael Mauldin's work a ...

, a defunct

chatbot A chatbot or chatterbot is a Software agent, software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or Speech synthesis, text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly si ...

program, is based on Mauldin's work. Mauldin is an active competitor in the

Robot Fighting League Robot combat is a mode of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots. Robot combat compet ...

Early life and education

Mauldin was born on March 23, 1959 in

Dallas, Texas Dallas () is the third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 million people. It is the largest city in and seat of Dallas County w ...

to Jimmie Alton Mauldin and Marilyn Jean Taylor. In 1974 the family moved to Midland, Texas and Michael enrolled in Midland High School and graduated valedictorian in 1977. In 1981, he received a

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ...

from

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

. In 1983, he received

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

and in 1989, he received a

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

, both from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

(CMU). His Ph.D. advisor was

Jaime Carbonell Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation result ...

Career

In 1994, while working at CMU on the Informedia Digital Library project, Mauldin created Lycos from 3 pages of code. Along with CMU, he sold 80% of the company to

CMGI Steel Connect, Inc. is an American company that provides supply chain management services to software companies. During the dot-com bubble, the company, which was then known as CMGI, Inc., had a market capitalization of $41 billion and owned the n ...

for $2 million. In 1996, Lycos was the fastest company ever to become a

public company A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) company can be listed on a stock exchange (l ...

via an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

. Mauldin sold his stake in Lycos during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

and retired. In 1997, he left Lycos to form Conversive with

Peter Plantec Peter Plantec is a writer, digital artist and software designer. Career As president of Virtual Personalities, Inc., Plantec was responsible for the design and development of Sylvie, the first practical commercial virtual human interface using ...

. The company was 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 re ...

software company that created self-animated computer-generated human characters. He remained on the

board of directors A board of directors (commonly referred simply as the board) is an executive committee that jointly supervises the activities of an organization, which can be either a for-profit or a nonprofit organization such as a business, nonprofit organiz ...

of the company until 2013, when it was acquired by

Avaya Avaya Holdings Corp., often shortened to Avaya (), is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, that provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services. The company's platform includ ...

. In 2000, after watching ''

BattleBots ''BattleBots'' (logo: Bꓭ)In season 10, the 2020-2021 TV season, the show introduced the "Bꓭ" logo is an American robot combat television series. The show was an adaptation of the British show '' Robot Wars'', in which competitors design and o ...

'', Mauldin built a robot and became a successful competitor in

robot combat Robot combat is a mode of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots. Robot combat compet ...

. In August 2015, he became a member of the board of directors of Lycos, now owned by Suresh Reddy. In 2017, he appeared on '' Robot Wars'' as the team captain for the "rest of the world" team.

Patents

Mauldin is the inventor or co-inventor of the following 4 patents: * US 5,748,954 - "Method for searching a queued and ranked constructed catalog of files stored on a network" * US 5,835,667 - "Method and apparatus for creating a searchable digital video library and a system and method of using such a library" * US 5,664,227 - "System and method for skimming digital audio/video data" * US 7,253,817 - "Virtual human interface for conducting surveys"

Personal life

Mauldin is married to Debbie and they have grown children. In addition to

, they enjoy traveling via

recreational vehicle A recreational vehicle, often abbreviated as RV, is a motor vehicle or trailer that includes living quarters designed for accommodation. Types of RVs include motorhomes, campervans, coaches, caravans (also known as travel trailers and camper ...

and driving his

Jeep Wrangler The Jeep Wrangler is a series of compact and mid-size four-wheel drive off-road SUVs manufactured by Jeep since 1986 and is currently in its fourth generation. The Wrangler JL, the most recent generation, was revealed in late 2017 and is produ ...

Sahara through the desert. They owned an 81-acre ranch near

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...

. He is also an active bowler with a Brunswick Pearl engraved with his name "Fuzzy". Mauldin was recruited by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

but opted to stay retired.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mauldin, Michael Loren 1959 births American computer scientists Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people Rice University alumni