Peter Norvig


Peter Norvig is an American computer scientist. He is a director of research at Google Inc., and used to be its director of search quality.

Education

Norvig received a Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career and research

Norvig is an AAAI Fellow and councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart Russell, of ', now the leading college text in the field. He was head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis, neuroengineering, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was chief scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison shopping services; chief designer at Harlequin Inc.; and senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
Norvig has served an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at Berkeley. He has over fifty publications in various areas of computer science, concentrating on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval and software engineering, including the books ', , Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.
Norvig is one of the creators of JScheme. In 2006 he was inducted as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Norvig is listed under "Academic Faculty & Advisors" for the Singularity University. In 2011, Norvig worked with Sebastian Thrun to develop a popular online course in Artificial Intelligence that had more than 160,000 students enrolled. He also teaches an online course via the Udacity platform. He believes that a teaching revolution, fostered by computer tools, is pending.

Other writing

In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years", arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages.
Norvig is also known for his "Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation", a satire about bad presentation practices using Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address.