Peter Norvig

Very short Bio (75 words)

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc; previously he directed Google's core search algorithms group. He is co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field, and co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Short Bio (200 words)

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research at Google Inc. Previously he was head of Google's core search algorithms group, and of NASA Ames's Computational Sciences Division, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artifical Intelligence class that signed up 160,000 students, helping to kick off the current round of massive open online classes. His publications include the books Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (the leading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Long Formal Vita / Resume (5 Page)

My formal Curriculum Vitae, including publications.

Major Accomplishments

Google Web Search: As Director of Search at Google from 2002—2005 it was my responsibility to maintain and improve the quality of our core web search algorithms during a time of twenty-fold growth and increased scrutiny from webmasters, the public, and the press.
Google Research: As the Director of Research at Google (starting in 2005) I oversaw the birth and growth of world-leading teams in machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. You can see a CACM article on our approach to research. More recently, as one of several research directors, I worked on education, democratization of AI, and growing the support network for start-up companies around the world.
Education: Co-teacher of an online AI class for which 160,000 students registered and 23,000 completed the course. An on-going experiment that has been called a groundbreaking change in academia, the course was featured on the front page of the New York Times. Since then we have re-offered the AI class through Udacity, the start-up company founded by my co-teacher Sebastian Thrun (but which I have no official position in), and I have taught another class On The Design of Computer Programs. At Google, I have worked on the Course Builder project, an open source package for building online classes. My article on Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years has had over 2 million readers, and some of my other pieces have been used by other educators.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. With Stuart Russell, co-author of what has been the leading textbook in AI since 1995, with over 300,000 copies sold and over 30,000 citations. At the Open Syllabus project, it is most-assigned book in computer science.
NASA: Remote Agent and Mars Exploration Rovers. My division developed the Remote Agent experiment that flew on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. This was the first use of autonomous planning, scheduling, and fault identification onboard a spacecraft. It won the 1999 NASA Software of the Year award and was cited in two AAAI Presidential addresses (by Nils Nilsson and by Ron Brachman) as one of the top achievements in the history of AI. The Remote Agent also served as a proving ground for some of the automated planning software that my team brought to the tremendously succesful Mars Exploration Rovers, or MER (which flew after I left NASA).
I also served as the only computer scientist on both investigation boards for the two failed Mars '98 missions. President Clinton commented on these boards that "I think the important thing is that, from our point of view, NASA responded in an honest, up-front way to their difficulties with the two Mars probes that didn't work so well ... and I would like to see their budget increase now." The investigation boards may or may not have been a cause for the succesful MER missions, but they were certainly a prerequisite.
Junglee: Comparison ads and shopping site. I was employee #8 at Junglee, one of the first web metasearch sites for classified ads and shopping. I was responsible for maintaining the algorithms, dictionaries and grammar rules for text-based extraction. I then co-led a small team that produced a second-generation development environment (in Java instead of Perl), and built the shopping tool that became the Yahoo Shopping site, and thereafter Junglee's most important product line, prior to our acquisition by Amazon.com.
Paradigms of AI Programming. This book has been called "The best book on programming ever written". That is a subjective opinion (and I for one would disagree), but there seems to be a consensus that this is one of the 3 or 4 top books on Lisp programming.
Open source software. In addition to the commercial software I've helped develop at Google, Junglee, Sun, and elsewhere, I've also donated open source software that has had an impact:
- My Pytudes repository of Python notebooks has 15,000 stars on github and has been widely used.
- I oversaw the development of code to accompany the AI textbook. Many volunteers and Google Summer of Code programmers contributed. The project has over 5,000 stars on github.
- I developed JScheme (nee SILK), a Scheme implemented in Java, that has been used by over 1,000 students and many professionals. Tim Hickey and the late Ken Anderson took over most of the development after the initial versions.
- My implementation of Prolog in Lisp from PAIP served as the basis for professional versions offered by Franz Inc. and Lispworks.
- My natural language parser from PAIP was used in Cyc and several other projects.

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Peter Norvig