Edward Feigenbaum

He founded the Heuristic Programming Project (HPP) and the Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL) at Stanford University and is currently Kumagai Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford. In 1965, Feigenbaum and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg started the DENDRAL project. Later joined by chemist Carl Djerassi and others, this project produced the world's first expert system. Expert systems are AI programs that capture, represent and use the detailed knowledge of experts in a specific subject area to solve problems in that area at the level of expert's thinking. DENDRAL's field of expertise was organic chemistry and it was able to infer molecular structures from experimental data from a mass spectrometer. Building on these methods, a variant, Meta-DENDRAL, was able to discover the theory behind DENDRAL's expert knowledge in one area of chemistry, resulting in the first publication in a major scientific journal of scientific knowledge inferred by and AI program. The DENDRAL project's groundbreaking accomplishments inspired thousands of expert systems, moving artificial intelligence out of the laboratory and into applications across many areas, from defense, medicine, engineering, science, and industrial processes. Feigenbaum and the DENDRAL Project are known for one of the AI science's most important generalizations, the "knowledge is power hypothesis", that attributes the power of an AI program to solve real-world problems primarily to its knowledge base rather than to its inference processes. Feigenbaum holds a B.S. (1956) and Ph.D. (1960), both from Carnegie Mellon University. His dissertation was supervised by legendary computer pioneer and later Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon. It did an early and pioneering computer simulation model of how people learn and memorize. After a Fulbright Fellowship and a faculty position at UC Berkeley, he joined the new Stanford Computer Science Department in 1965. He served as Director of the Stanford Computation Center from 1965 to 1968 and as chairman of the department from 1976 to 1981. He also helped establish Stanford's SUMEX-AIM national computer facility for applications of AI to medicine and biology.