Peter E. Hart (born 1941) 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 (a ...

and entrepreneur. He was chairman and president of Ricoh Innovations, which he founded in 1997. He made significant contributions in the field of computer science in a series of widely cited publications from the years 1967–75 while associated with the

Artificial Intelligence Center The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the Robo ...

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 ...

, a laboratory where he also served as director.

Education

Hart studied at

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute () (RPI) is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van ...

, leading to a BEE degree (1962). He did his graduate studies at

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 conside ...

, where he got his MS (1963) and PhD (1966); Thomas M. Cover was his advisor and discovered & co-published a seminal paper on 1-NN nearest neighbor search."Nearest neighbor pattern classification"
Cover & Hart 1967
IEEE

Career

While at the

, Hart co-authored 20 papers, among them the initial exposition of the

A* search algorithm A* (pronounced "A-star") is a graph traversal and path search algorithm, which is used in many fields of computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. One major practical drawback is its O(b^d) space complexity, ...

and the variant of the

Hough transform The Hough transform is a feature extraction technique used in image analysis, computer vision, and digital image processing. The purpose of the technique is to find imperfect instances of objects within a certain class of shapes by a voting proce ...

now widely used in computer vision for finding straight line segments in images. He also contributed to the development of

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 dow ...

. Hart and

Richard O. Duda Richard O. Duda is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University renowned for his work on sound localization and pattern recognition. He lives in Menlo Park, California. Education Duda received B.S. and M.S. d ...

are the authors of "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis", originally published in 1973. This classic text is a widely cited reference, and the first edition was in print for over 25 years until being superseded by the second edition in 2000. A strong advocate of artificial intelligence in industry, Hart was the founding director of the Fairchild/Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Center and co-founder of Syntelligence, a company specializing in expert systems for financial risk analysis. Hart is currently Group Senior Vice President at the

Ricoh is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational imaging and electronics company (law), company. It was founded by the now-defunct commercial division of the Riken, Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) known as the ''Riken ...

Company, Ltd.

Memberships and awards

Hart is an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

, an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

and an

AAAI 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 ...

Fellow.

References

External links

Hart's personal web page

Hart's web page at Ricoh Innovations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hart, Peter E American engineering writers Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Stanford University alumni 1940s births Living people SRI International people Fellow Members of the IEEE Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence