This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – expert systems were introduced by Edward Feigenbaum

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum formally introduces expert systems in 1965. He was a part of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, which contained other notable AI pioneers.

Edward Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist focused on Artificial Intelligence. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University for both his B.S. and Ph.D., with Herbert Simon, an AI pioneer, as his doctoral advisor. He would go on to work at UC Berkeley and Stanford, the latter where he became Professor Emeritus of Computer Science (since 2000). Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 with Raj Reddy for pioneering in AI and demonstrating its commercial potential.

The Stanford Heuristic Programming Project included members outside of Edward Feigenbaum such as Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi. They are most notable for the MYCIN experiments. Many of their papers and research can be read here.

Expert systems would become the basis for future AI products and developments. Furthermore, the members who were a part of this project would also work on other pioneering projects in A. Thus, the HAI initiative sees this event as a marker in the history of AI.