Steve Omohundro
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Stephen Malvern Omohundro (born 1959) is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include
Hamiltonian Hamiltonian may refer to: * Hamiltonian mechanics, a function that represents the total energy of a system * Hamiltonian (quantum mechanics), an operator corresponding to the total energy of that system ** Dyall Hamiltonian, a modified Hamiltonian ...
physics, dynamical systems,
programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...
s,
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...
,
machine vision Machine vision (MV) is the technology and methods used to provide imaging-based automatic inspection and analysis for such applications as automatic inspection, process control, and robot guidance, usually in industry. Machine vision refers to ...
, and the social implications of
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 ...
. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.


Education

Omohundro has degrees in physics and mathematics from Stanford University (
Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...
) and a Ph.D. in physics 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 ...
.


Learning algorithms

Omohundro started the "Vision and Learning Group" at the
University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
which produced 4 Masters and 2 Ph.D. theses. His work in learning algorithms included a number of efficient geometric algorithms, the
manifold learning Nonlinear dimensionality reduction, also known as manifold learning, refers to various related techniques that aim to project high-dimensional data onto lower-dimensional latent manifolds, with the goal of either visualizing the data in the low- ...
task and various algorithms for accomplishing this task, other related visual learning and modelling tasks, the model merging approach to machine learning (including the learning of Hidden Markov Models and Stochastic Context-free Grammars), and the Family Discovery Learning Algorithm, which discovers the dimension and structure of a parameterized family of stochastic models.


Self-improving artificial intelligence and AI safety

Omohundro started Self-Aware Systems in
Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...
, California to research the technology and social implications of self-improving artificial intelligence. He is an advisor to the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artifi ...
on artificial intelligence. He argues that rational systems exhibit problematic natural "drives" that will need to be countered in order to build intelligent systems safely. His papers, talks, and videos on AI safety have generated extensive interest. He has given many talks on self-improving artificial intelligence, cooperative technology, AI safety, and connections with biological intelligence.


Programming languages

At
Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachusett ...
, Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro developed Star Lisp, the first programming language for the
Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...
. Omohundro joined the
International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...
(ICSI) in
Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and E ...
, where he led the development of the open source programming language Sather. Sather is featured in O'Reilly's History of Programming Languages poster.


Physics and dynamical systems theory

Omohundro's book ''Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics'' describes natural Hamiltonian symplectic structures for a wide range of physical models that arise from
perturbation theory In mathematics and applied mathematics, perturbation theory comprises methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related, simpler problem. A critical feature of the technique is a middl ...
analyses. He showed that there exist smooth partial differential equations which stably perform universal computation by simulating arbitrary
cellular automata A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...
. The asymptotic behavior of these PDEs is therefore logically undecidable. With John David Crawford he showed that the orbits of three-dimensional period doubling systems can form an infinite number of topologically distinct
torus knot In knot theory, a torus knot is a special kind of knot that lies on the surface of an unknotted torus in R3. Similarly, a torus link is a link which lies on the surface of a torus in the same way. Each torus knot is specified by a pair of cop ...
s and described the structure of their stable and unstable manifolds.


Mathematica and Apple tablet contest

From 1986 to 1988, he was an Assistant Professor of
Computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and cofounded the Center for Complex Systems Research with
Stephen Wolfram Stephen Wolfram (; born 29 August 1959) is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer science, mathematics, and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Ma ...
and
Norman Packard Norman Harry Packard (born 1954 in Billings, Montana) is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known f ...
. While at the University of Illinois, he worked with Stephen Wolfram and five others to create the symbolic mathematics program Mathematica. He and Wolfram led a team of students that won an Apple Computer contest to design "The Computer of the Year 2000." Their design entry "Tablet" was a touchscreen tablet with GPS and other features that finally appeared when the Apple iPad was introduced 22 years later.


Other contributions

Subutai Ahmad and Steve Omohundro developed biologically realistic neural models of selective attention. As a research scientist at the
NEC Research Institute NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) is the principal subsidiary of the multinational IT company NEC in the United States. NEC Corporation of America was formed on July 1, 2006, from the combined operations of NEC America, NEC Solutions (America) ...
, Omohundro worked on machine learning and computer vision, and was a co-inventor of U.S. Patent 5,696,964, "Multimedia Database Retrieval System Which Maintains a Posterior Probability Distribution that Each Item in the Database is a Target of a Search."


Pirate puzzle

Omohundro developed an extension to the game theoretic pirate puzzle featured in ''Scientific American''.


Outreach

Omohundro has sat on the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artifi ...
board of advisors. He has written extensively on artificial intelligence, and has warned that "an autonomous weapons arms race is already taking place" because "military and economic pressures are driving the rapid development of autonomous systems".


References


External links

*
Self-Aware Systems

Steve Omohundro Interviews Playlist
{{DEFAULTSORT:Omohundro, Steve Living people 1959 births American computer scientists Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Cellular automatists Stanford University alumni