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Who Is Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to both theoretical and practical advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neural networks, and the theory of Turing Machines and recursive functions. He has made major contributions in the domains of symbolic graphical description, computational geometry, knowledge representation, computational semantics, machine perception, symbolic and connectionist learning. He has also been involved with many studies of advanced technologies for space exploration.

Professor Minsky was also one of the pioneers of intelligence-based mechanical robotics and telepresence. He designed and built some of the first mechanical hands with tactile sensors, visual scanners, and their software and computer interfaces. He also influenced many robotic projects outside of MIT, and designed and built the first LOGO "turtle." In 1951 he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine (called SNARC, for Stochastic Neural-Analog Reinforcement Computer), based on the reinforcement of simulated synaptic transmission coefficients. When a Junior Fellow at Harvard, he invented and built the first Confocal Scanning Microscope, an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality.

Since the early 1950s, Marvin Minsky has worked on using computational ideas to characterize human psychological processes, as well as working to endow machines with intelligence. In 1959, Minsky and John McCarthyf ounded what became the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and hisl ong tenure as its co-director placed his imprint upon the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. His seminal 1961 paper, "Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence" surveyed and analyzed all of what had been done before, and set forth the major problems of that infant discipline.The 1963 paper, "Matter, Mind, and Models" addressed the problem of making self-aware machines; in "Perceptrons," 1969, he and Seymour Papert characterized the capabilities and limitations of loop-free learning and pattern recognition machines. In "A Framework for Representing Knowledge" (1974) he put forth a model of knowledge representation to account for many phenomena in cognition, language understanding, and visual perception. These representations, called "frames," inherited their variable assignments from previously defined frames, and are often considered to be an early form of object-oriented programming.

In the early 1970s, Minsky and Papert began formulating a theory called "The Society of Mind" which combined insights from developmental child psychology and their experience with research on Artificial Intelligence. The Society of Mind proposes that intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism, but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents. They argued that such diversity is necessary because different tasks require fundamentally different mechanisms; this transforms psychology from a fruitless quest for a few "basic" principles into a search for mechanisms that a mind could use to manage the interaction of many diverse elements.



Bits and pieces of this theory emerged in papers through the 70s andearly 80s. Papert turned his energies to applying these new ideas to transforming education while Minsky continued to work primarily on the theory. In 1985,he published "The Society of Mind," a book in which 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself. Each page either proposes one such mechanism ­ to account for some psychological phenomena ­ or addresses a problem introduced by some proposed solution of another page.

Since the publication of "The Society of Mind," Minsky has continued to develop the theory in several directions. He is currently working on a new book, "The Emotion Machine," describing the roles played by feelings, goals, emotions, and conscious thoughts in terms of processes that motivate and regulate the activities within our personal societies of mind.

E-mail: minsky@media.mit.edu
WWW: http://www.ai.mit.edu/~minsky/minsky.html

Bibliography

· "Neural Nets and the Brain Model Problem", 1954 -Princeton Universty

· "Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines", 1967- Prentice-Hall

· "SemanticI nformation Processing", 1968 - MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

· "Perceptrons", (with Seymour A. Papert) 1969 and 1988 - MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

· "Artificial Intelligence", 1972 - Univ. Oregon Press

· "Why People Think Computers Can´t", 1982 - Associated Univ. Presses, Cranbury, NJ

· "Robotics", 1986 - Doubleday

· "The Society of Mind", 1987

· "Inventingt he Confocal Microscope", 1988

· "Simbolic vs. Connectonist", 1990, MIT Press

· "The Turing Option", (with Harry Harrison) 1992 - Warner Books

· "Will Robots Inherit the Earth?", 1994 - Scientific American

· "Negative Expertise", 1994 - International Journal of Expert Systems

· "Matter, Mind and Models", 1995 - MIT

· "Virtual Molecular Reality", 1995 - Markus Krumenacker& James Lewis

· "TheSociety of Mind CD ROM Version", 1996 ,

· "The Emotion Machine", New Book (in press).

Adapted from Dr. Minsky's WWW Home Page, official biography.


Date: 2016-01-05; view: 1102


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