Oliver Gordon Selfridge (10 May 1926 – 3 December 2008) was a pioneer 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 ...

. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception."

Biography

Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of

Harry Gordon Selfridge Harry Gordon Selfridge, Sr. (11 January 1858 – 8 May 1947) was an American retail magnate who founded the London-based department store Selfridges. His 20-year leadership of Selfridges led to his becoming one of the most respected and wealthy ...

, the founder of

Selfridges Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high-end department stores in the United Kingdom that is operated by Selfridges Retail Limited, part of the Selfridges Group of department stores. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridg ...

department stores. His father was Harry Gordon Selfridge Jr. and his mother was a clerk at Selfridge's store. His parents had met, fallen in love, married and had children all in secret, and Oliver never met his grandfather, Harry Sr. He was educated at Malvern College, and, upon moving to the US, at

Middlesex School Middlesex School is a coeducational, non-sectarian, day and boarding independent secondary school for grades 9-12 located in Concord, Massachusetts. It was founded as an all-boys school in 1901 by a Roxbury Latin School alumnus, Frederick Winsor, ...

Concord, Massachusetts Concord () is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. At the 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is near where the confl ...

, before earning an S.B. from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

in mathematics in 1945. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at

, but did not write up his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D.

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

considered Selfridge to be one of his mentors, and Selfridge was one of the 11 attendees, with Minsky, of the

Dartmouth workshop The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was a 1956 summer workshop widely consideredKline, Ronald R., Cybernetics, Automata Studies and the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IEEE Annals of the History of ...

that is considered the founding event of

as a field. Selfridge wrote important early papers on neural networks,

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

, and

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 ...

, and his "Pandemonium" paper (1959) is generally recognized as a classic in

. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to

aspect-oriented programming In computing, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding behavior to existing code (an advice) ''without'' modifying th ...

. In 1968, in their formative paper "The Computer as a Communication Device",

J. C. R. Licklider Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or "Lick", was an American psychologistMiller, G. A. (1991), "J. C. R. Licklider, psychologist", ''Journal of the Acoustical Society of Am ...

and Robert Taylor introduced a concept known as an OLIVER (On-Line Interactive Vicarious Expediter and Responder), which was named in honor of Selfridge. Selfridge spent his career at

Lincoln Laboratory The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, located in Lexington, Massachusetts, is a United States Department of Defense federally funded research and development center chartered to apply advanced technology to problems of national security. Research and de ...

(where he was Associate Director of

Project MAC Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

Bolt, Beranek and Newman Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...

, and GTE Laboratories where he became Chief Scientist. He served on the

NSA The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

Advisory Board for 20 years, chairing the Data Processing Panel. Selfridge retired in 1993. In 2015, Duncan Campbell identified Selfridge as his "best source" for Campbell's 1980 reporting on US

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

wiretapping activity at

Menwith Hill Royal Air Force Menwith Hill is a Royal Air Force station near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, which provides communications and intelligence support services to the United Kingdom and the United States. The site contains an extensive sate ...

, UK. Campbell described this operation in ''

New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members ...

'' as a "billion dollar phone tap". Selfridge also authored four children's books: ''Sticks'', ''Fingers Come In Fives'', ''All About Mud'', and ''Trouble With Dragons''. Selfridge was married and divorced twice and is survived by two daughters and two sons.

Biography

See also

Notes

Further reading