Marvin Lee Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (1927-2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist.
Life
Marvin Lee Minsky was born on August 9, 1927 in New York city. He swerved in the US Navy during World War II, received a BA in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 and a PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 1954. He was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1954 to 1957, then on the MIT faculty from 1958 until his death. In 1959 he and John McCarthy initiated what was later named the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He died on January 24, 2016 in Boston, Massachusetts.
Contributions
Minsky was interested in artificial intelligence. He built the Snarc - one of the 1st electronic learning machines. He was co-founder and director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab 1959. He has worked at MIT since 1957. He established General Turtle Inc. and Thinking Machines Corporation. According to Feigenbaum and Feldman, "Minsky's work has been integral to the establishment of...artificial intelligence...the mathematical theory of computation...robotics, computer vision, and telepresence" (Current Biography). He was interested in the principle of artificial intelligence in which computers mimic psychological processes. Minsky wrote The Society of Mind.
Publications
Numerous publications are listed by dbpl [1] and Google Scholar [2].
- Computation: finite and infinite machines. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall [1967]
- Semantic information processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969.
- "A Framework for Representing Knowledge." (1974). Reprinted in: Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence. Ed. by J. Haugeland. Cambridge, MA, 1997.
The MIT Press
- The society of mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
- Oral history interview with Marvin L. Minsky. University of Minnesota. Charles Babbage Institute, 1989. [3]
- "Steps toward artificial intelligence." Artificial intelligence: critical concepts, ed. by R. Chrisley. London: Routledge, 2000, pp 102-154.
- The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
Offices
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. President, 1981-82.
Awards
- Association for Computing Machinery. Turing Award, 1970.