Peter Norvig was born on December 14, 1956. He is an American computer scientist and a Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Before his current role, he worked as a director of research and search quality at Google. Norvig co-authored a widely used textbook titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach with Stuart J. Russell. This textbook is used in over 1,500 universities across 135 countries.
Early life and education
Norvig came from a family of scholars. His father was from Denmark and moved to the United States after World War II to study mathematics at the University of Minnesota. Norvig earned 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
Peter Norvig is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-authored the book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach with Stuart J. Russell. This book is now the most widely used college textbook in the field of artificial intelligence. He previously led the Computational Sciences Division, which is now called the Intelligent Systems Division, at NASA Ames Research Center. At NASA, he managed a team of 200 scientists who conducted research and development in areas such as autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering, data analysis, neuroengineering, collaborative systems, and simulation-based decision-making. Before joining NASA, he worked as the chief scientist at Junglee, where he helped create one of the first Internet comparison-shopping services. He also served as chief designer at Harlequin Inc. and as a senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
Norvig has worked as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and as a research faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written more than fifty publications in computer science, focusing on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, information retrieval, and software engineering. His books include Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX.
Norvig helped create JScheme, a programming language. He is listed as an academic advisor at Singularity University. In 2011, he worked with Sebastian Thrun to develop an online course in artificial intelligence that had more than 160,000 students enrolled. He also teaches an online course through the Udacity platform.
Selected publications and presentations
By 2022, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which Norvig first co-authored with Stuart J. Russell in 1995, was the most widely used textbook in the field of artificial intelligence, adopted by more than 1,400 schools worldwide.
In 2001, Norvig published an article titled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, in which he disagreed with popular beginner programming books that claimed to teach programming skills in just days or weeks. The article became widely shared and discussed, and translations of it were contributed in over 20 languages.
Norvig is also known for his 2003 Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation, a humorous critique of poor presentation techniques that used Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address as an example.
His 2009 article in IEEE Intelligent Systems, titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”, co-authored with Alon Y. Halevy and Fernando Pereira, explained that solving complex natural language understanding problems often requires using large amounts of data rather than relying on simple formulas. The authors noted that new algorithms can use large, unlabeled, and noisy data to create high-quality models. They stated, “Simple models and a lot of data are often more effective than complex models based on less data.” They also recommended using representations that allow unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is far more common than labeled data. The title of the article refers to a 1960 journal article by physicist Eugene Wigner titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.”
In a September 23, 2010, lecture given as part of the University of British Columbia’s Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series, Norvig, who was then Google’s Director of Research, explained how large amounts of data help improve our understanding of complex phenomena.
In his June 2012 TED Talk, Norvig described a fall 2011 online artificial intelligence course that he co-taught with Sebastian Thrun at Stanford University, which had 100,000 students enrolled globally.
Norvig was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2001 and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2006.