Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. Minsky served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He held a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in…
Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco…
Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and Director of Engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and…
Raissa D’Souza is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Davis, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, then was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories, and later at Microsoft Research. Her…
Scott Joel Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist and faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After postdoctorates at the Institute for Advanced Study and the University of Waterloo, he took a faculty position at MIT in 2007. His primary area of research is quantum computing…
Rodney Allen Brooks is the former Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1986 he has authored a series of highly influential papers that have brought on a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research. Brooks formerly served as Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From July 1,…
Gregory John Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. Beginning in the late 1960s, Chaitin made contributions to algorithmic information theory and metamathematics, in particular a new incompleteness theorem in reaction to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and City College of New York, where he (still in his…
Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50. He is a Professor at Oxford University where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director.…