Peter Norvig (born December 14, 1956) is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

and Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He previously served as a director of research and search quality at

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. ...

. Norvig is the co-author with

Stuart J. Russell Stuart Jonathan Russell (born 1962) is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct ...

of the most popular textbook in the field of AI: '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'' used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.

Education

Norvig received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathematical s ...

from

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

and 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 ...

in computer science from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

Career and research

Norvig is a councilor of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

and co-author, with

, of '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'', now the leading college text in the field. He was head of the Computational Sciences Division (now the Intelligent Systems Division) at NASA

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis,

neuroengineering Neural engineering (also known as neuroengineering) is a discipline within biomedical engineering that uses engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace, or enhance neural systems. Neural engineers are uniquely qualified to solve design ...

, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was chief scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison-shopping services; chief designer at Harlequin Inc.; and senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Norvig has served an assistant professor at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

and a research faculty member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of computer science, concentrating on

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 ...

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 pro ...

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 software engineering, including the books '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'', '' Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp'', ''Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog'', and ''Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX''. Norvig is one of the creators of

JScheme JScheme is an implementation of the Scheme programming language, created by Kenneth R. Anderson, Timothy J. Hickey and Peter Norvig, which is almost compliant with the R4RS Scheme standard and which has an interface to Java. Distributed under ...

. Norvig is listed under "Academic Faculty & Advisors" for the

Singularity University Singularity Education Group (using the public names Singularity Group, Singularity University or SingularityU) is an American company that offers executive educational programs, a business incubator, and business consultancy services. Although ...

. In 2011, Norvig worked with

Sebastian Thrun Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Co ...

to develop a popular online course in Artificial Intelligence that had more than 160,000 students enrolled. He also teaches an online course via the

Udacity Udacity, Inc. is an American for-profit educational organization founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses. According to Thrun, the origin of the name Udacity comes from the company's desi ...

platform.

Selected publications and presentations

By 2022, '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'', which Norvig first co-authored with

in 1995, was the leading textbook in the field used by over 1400 schools globally. In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled ''Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years'', arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages. Norvig is also known for his 2003 ''Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation'', a satire about bad presentation practices using

Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...

's famous

Gettysburg Address The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on the ...

. His 2009 IEEE Intelligent Systems article, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" co-authored with Alon Y. Halevy and Fernando Pereira, described how the best approach to highly complex natural language understanding problems is to harness large quantities of data, not to depend on "tidy", simple formulas. They said that by generating "large amounts of unlabeled, noisy data, new algorithms can be used to build high-quality models from the data. This has informed the development of foundation models. "But invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data." "Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data." The title refers to the

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

Eugene Wigner Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner ( hu, Wigner Jenő Pál, ; November 17, 1902 – January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his con ...

's 1960 journal article, "

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" is a 1960 article by the physicist Eugene Wigner. In the paper, Wigner observes that a physical theory's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that ...

". The Richard Courant lecture in mathematical sciences delivered at New York University, May 11, 1959 In a 23 September 2010 lecture presented as part of the

Vancouver Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the ...

-based

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

's Department of Computer Science's Distinguished Lecture Series, Norvig, who was then the Director of Research at Google, described how large quantities of data deepen our understanding of phenomena. In his June 2012

Ted Talk TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "ideas worth spreading". TED was founded by Richard Sau ...

, described the fall of 2011 hybrid class on artificial intelligence attended by 100,000 online students around the globe that he co-taught with

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Awards and honors

Norvig was elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 2001 and a

fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

in 2006.

References

External links

The Prospects for AI
featuring Neil Jacobstein, Patrick Lincoln, Peter Norvig, and Bruno Olshausen
An experiment by Norvig
on

Scientific opinion on climate change There is a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities. This consensus is supported by various studies of scientists' opinions and by position statements of scientific org ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Norvig, Peter Artificial intelligence researchers Google employees American computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Lisp (programming language) people Python (programming language) people Living people 1956 births Brown University alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Natural language processing researchers