This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman publish “Computers and Thought”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum and Julian Feldman published Computers and Thought, a book composed of articles on artificial intelligence, in 1963. Perhaps the first anthology on the topic, Feigenbaum and Feldman edited and wrote some of the articles but they were not the only contributors. Computers and Thought includes 20 articles from notable AI pioneers such as Alan Turing, Marvin Minsky, Allan Newell, Herbert Simon, and others.

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, another 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 HAI Initiative had the fortune of meeting and discussing AI history earlier this year.

Julian Feldman is an American computer scientist with an eye on Artificial Intelligence. Feldman studied at the University of Chicago for his undergrad; received an M.A. in political science; before going to Carnegie Mellon’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration for his Ph.D. He held a tenured position at UC Berkeley, before leaving it to help build UC Irvine, where he would create its Information and Computer Sciences department, the first ICS school in the UC system. Feldman also wrote papers and articles on connectionism, a fairly contentious topic within AI and computer science.

The HAI Initiative considers the publication of this book an important event in the history of AI due to the culmination of various thoughts on AI from its pioneers. Feigenbaum and Feldman themselves are also notable figures in the development of artificial intelligence.