Textbook of AI

140 entries

People

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T V W Y

A

• Robert Abelson , Co-author with Schank of Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding
• Sam Altman , Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; central figure of the modern AI industry
• Daniela Amodei , Co-founder and President of Anthropic; former senior policy lead at OpenAI
• Dario Amodei , Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; former VP Research at OpenAI

B

• Charles Babbage , Designed the first general-purpose mechanical computer
• Dzmitry Bahdanau , First author of the 2014 attention-mechanism paper that preceded the Transformer
• Yehoshua Bar-Hillel , Founder of computational linguistics; sceptic of fully automatic high-quality machine translation
• Andrew Barto , Co-founder of reinforcement learning; Sutton's PhD adviser and long-time co-author
• Sven Behnke , Pre-2012 GPU-trained convolutional neural network results
• Yoshua Bengio , Co-developer of neural language models; founding scientist of MILA
• David Blei , Co-inventor of latent Dirichlet allocation; pioneer of topic modelling and probabilistic ML
• Daniel Bobrow , Author of STUDENT (algebra word problems); pioneer of knowledge representation
• George Boole , Founder of mathematical logic; gave AI its symbolic algebra of true and false
• Léon Bottou , Pioneer of stochastic gradient descent at scale; long-time LeCun collaborator
• Leo Breiman , Inventor of CART, bagging and random forests
• Greg Brockman , Co-founder of OpenAI; former CTO and President; led training infrastructure for GPT line
• Rodney Brooks , Founder of behaviour-based robotics; inventor of the subsumption architecture
• Tom Brown , First author of the GPT-3 paper that launched the modern LLM era
• Bruce Buchanan , Co-developer of DENDRAL and MYCIN; pioneer of knowledge-based systems

C

• Noam Chomsky , Founder of generative grammar; established a hierarchy of formal languages
• Paul Christiano , Pioneer of RLHF; founder of the Alignment Research Center
• Alonzo Church , Invented the lambda calculus; co-founded computability theory
• Corinna Cortes , Co-author of the 1995 SVM paper; head of Google Research New York

D

• Tri Dao , Inventor of FlashAttention and co-inventor of Mamba
• Jeff Dean , Senior fellow at Google; co-founded Google Brain
• Jacob Devlin , First author of BERT, the bidirectional Transformer that defined a generation of NLP
• Pedro Domingos , Author of "The Master Algorithm"; pioneer of statistical relational learning
• Hubert Dreyfus , Author of "What Computers Can't Do"; long-time philosophical critic of AI

E

• Douglas Engelbart , Inventor of the mouse and pioneer of interactive computing
• Lee Erman , Lead developer of Hearsay-II, the canonical blackboard speech-understanding system

F

• Edward Feigenbaum , Co-founder of Stanford AI Lab; led the development of DENDRAL and MYCIN
• Richard Fikes , Co-author of STRIPS, the founding planning formalism
• Gottlob Frege , Founder of modern logic; invented quantification and predicate calculus
• Yoav Freund , Co-inventor of AdaBoost; pioneer of boosting and online learning

G

• Herbert Gelernter , Author of the Geometry Theorem Prover (1959)
• Kurt Gödel , Proved the incompleteness of arithmetic; reshaped the limits of formal systems
• Aidan Gomez , Co-author of "Attention Is All You Need" (2017); CEO and co-founder of Cohere
• Ian Goodfellow , Inventor of generative adversarial networks (GANs)
• Stephen Grossberg , Founder of adaptive resonance theory; long-running neural-network researcher
• Albert Gu , Inventor of state-space models for sequence modelling; co-inventor of Mamba

H

• Peter Hart , Co-author of A*; pioneer of pattern recognition and probabilistic search
• Demis Hassabis , Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind; led AlphaGo and AlphaFold
• Pat Hayes , Co-author of the situation calculus; pioneer of formal commonsense reasoning
• Kaiming He , First author of ResNet, the residual networks that enabled training of very deep networks
• Donald Hebb , Formulated Hebbian learning, the synaptic basis of associative learning
• Carl Hewitt , Inventor of the Actor model and of PLANNER, the procedural-knowledge AI language
• David Hilbert , Posed the Entscheidungsproblem whose negative solution founded computability theory
• Geoffrey Hinton , Co-founder of deep learning; backpropagation populariser; 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics
• Sepp Hochreiter , Co-inventor of LSTM; identified the vanishing-gradient problem
• John Holland , Founder of genetic algorithms and the study of complex adaptive systems
• John Hopfield , Inventor of the Hopfield network; 2024 Nobel laureate in Physics
• Feng-hsiung Hsu , Lead architect of Deep Blue, the IBM chess computer that defeated Kasparov in 1997
• Edward Hu , First author of LoRA, the low-rank adapter method now standard for fine-tuning LLMs

I

• Geoffrey Irving , AI alignment researcher at DeepMind and now UK AI Safety Institute

J

• Su Jianlin , Inventor of RoPE, Rotary Position Embedding, the standard positional encoding for modern LLMs
• Michael Jordan , Influential statistical-machine-learning researcher; mentor of a generation of ML leaders

K

• Jared Kaplan , Co-author of the OpenAI scaling laws paper; co-founder of Anthropic
• Andrej Karpathy , Influential AI educator, former Tesla AI director, founding member of OpenAI
• Garry Kasparov , World chess champion who in 1997 became the first reigning champion to lose a match to a computer
• Diederik Kingma , Co-inventor of the variational autoencoder and the Adam optimiser
• Daphne Koller , Author of the standard probabilistic graphical models textbook; co-founder of Coursera
• Alex Krizhevsky , First author of AlexNet, the 2012 paper that launched the deep-learning revolution

L

• Yann LeCun , Inventor of the convolutional neural network for vision
• Joshua Lederberg , Geneticist and Nobel laureate; co-developer of DENDRAL, the first major expert system
• Shane Legg , Co-founder of DeepMind; AGI Safety co-lead at Google DeepMind
• Douglas Lenat , Author of AM and EURISKO; founder of the CYC commonsense knowledge project
• Patrick Lewis , First author of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paper
• Fei-Fei Li , Creator of ImageNet, the dataset that catalysed the deep-learning vision revolution
• J. C. R. Licklider , Articulated "man-computer symbiosis"; first director of ARPA's IPTO and founding sponsor of AI research
• James Lighthill , Author of the 1973 Lighthill report whose damning AI assessment triggered the UK AI winter
• Ada Lovelace , Wrote the first published algorithm for a computing machine

M

• Christopher Manning , Stanford NLP professor; co-author of the standard statistical NLP textbook
• David Marr , Founder of computational vision; proposed three levels of analysis for cognitive systems
• John McCarthy , Coined the term "artificial intelligence", invented LISP, founded Stanford AI Lab
• James McClelland , Co-editor of the PDP volumes; pioneer of connectionist cognitive models
• Warren McCulloch , Co-author of the first mathematical model of a neural network
• Drew McDermott , Author of the influential critique "Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity"
• Donald Michie , Founder of British AI; built BOXES, an early reinforcement-learning system
• Tomas Mikolov , Inventor of word2vec; pioneered modern word embeddings
• Marvin Minsky , Co-founder of MIT AI Lab; author of Perceptrons and The Society of Mind
• Tom Mitchell , Author of the definitive 1997 Machine Learning textbook
• Volodymyr Mnih , First author of the DQN paper that established deep reinforcement learning
• Mira Murati , Former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI

N

• John von Neumann , Architect of the stored-program computer; co-founder of game theory
• Allen Newell , Co-author of Logic Theorist, GPS and Soar; founded the symbol-system hypothesis
• Andrew Ng , Founder of Google Brain and Coursera; influential AI educator and Stanford ML lecturer
• Nils Nilsson , Co-author of A*; pioneer of robot planning; influential AI textbook author

O

• Christopher Olah , Pioneer of neural-network visualisation and mechanistic interpretability
• Long Ouyang , First author of the InstructGPT paper that introduced RLHF for language models

P

• Seymour Papert , Co-author of Perceptrons; inventor of Logo and pioneer of constructionism in education
• Judea Pearl , Founder of Bayesian networks and the modern theory of causal inference
• Walter Pitts , Co-author of the McCulloch–Pitts neuron; prodigy of mathematical biology

Q

• Ross Quillian , Pioneered semantic networks and spreading-activation models of memory
• Ross Quinlan , Inventor of the ID3 and C4.5 decision-tree algorithms

R

• Alec Radford , First author of GPT, GPT-2 and CLIP at OpenAI
• Bertram Raphael , Co-author of A*; author of SIR (Semantic Information Retriever)
• J. Alan Robinson , Inventor of the resolution rule, the foundation of automated theorem proving
• Nathaniel Rochester , Lead architect of the IBM 701; co-author of the Dartmouth proposal
• Frank Rosenblatt , Invented the perceptron; first practical learning algorithm for a neural network
• David Rumelhart , Co-author of the 1986 backpropagation paper and of the PDP volumes
• Bertrand Russell , Co-author of Principia Mathematica; gave AI the type theory and the paradox that constrained set theory
• Stuart Russell , AI textbook co-author; leading figure in AI safety and beneficial AI research

S

• Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Co-author of the deep belief network paper that launched the modern deep-learning era
• Arthur Samuel , Coined "machine learning"; built the first program to play checkers at master level
• Roger Schank , Author of conceptual dependency theory and of the script as a knowledge structure
• Robert Schapire , Co-inventor of boosting and AdaBoost
• Jürgen Schmidhuber , Co-inventor of LSTM; long-time advocate of his lab's role in deep-learning history
• Bernhard Schölkopf , Pioneer of kernel methods; founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
• John Schulman , Inventor of TRPO and PPO; co-founder of OpenAI; later at Anthropic
• Terry Sejnowski , Co-inventor of the Boltzmann machine; author of NETtalk
• Oliver Selfridge , Author of Pandemonium; pioneer of feature-based pattern recognition
• Claude Shannon , Founder of information theory; co-author of the Dartmouth proposal that named the field
• Cliff Shaw , Co-author of Logic Theorist and GPS; co-designer of the IPL programming languages
• Noam Shazeer , Co-author of the Transformer paper; co-founder of Character.AI; later Google Gemini co-lead
• Edward Shortliffe , Author of MYCIN; pioneer of medical AI and clinical decision support
• David Silver , Lead researcher on AlphaGo and AlphaZero at DeepMind
• Herbert Simon , Co-author of Logic Theorist and GPS; Nobel laureate in economics for bounded rationality
• James Slagle , Author of SAINT, a symbolic integration program
• Ray Solomonoff , Founded algorithmic probability and inductive inference; an attendee of the 1956 Dartmouth workshop
• Aravind Srinivas , Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity
• Mustafa Suleyman , Co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI; CEO of Microsoft AI from 2024
• Gerry Sussman , Co-author of SICP; pioneer of debugging-style problem solving in AI
• Ilya Sutskever , Co-author of AlexNet and seq2seq; co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI
• Richard Sutton , Co-founder of modern reinforcement learning; co-author of the standard RL textbook

T

• Gerald Tesauro , Author of TD-Gammon, the canonical example of self-play reinforcement learning
• Sebastian Thrun , Led Stanford's DARPA Grand Challenge winner Stanley; founder of Google's self-driving car project
• Naftali Tishby , Author of the information bottleneck principle
• Alan Turing , Founding figure of computer science and AI; defined computability and proposed the imitation game

V

• Vladimir Vapnik , Founder of statistical learning theory and the support vector machine
• Ashish Vaswani , First author of "Attention Is All You Need", introduced the Transformer architecture

W

• Jason Wei , First author of the Chain-of-Thought paper; pioneer of LLM prompting techniques
• Joseph Weizenbaum , Author of ELIZA; later a leading critic of the AI research programme
• Max Welling , Co-inventor of the variational autoencoder
• Liang Wenfeng , Founder of DeepSeek; produced the open-source DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model
• Paul Werbos , First to derive the backpropagation algorithm in his 1974 Harvard PhD thesis
• Alfred North Whitehead , Co-author of Principia Mathematica
• Norbert Wiener , Founded cybernetics, the science of control and communication in animals and machines
• Terry Winograd , Author of SHRDLU; later turned to human–computer interaction
• Patrick Winston , Long-time director of MIT AI Lab; pioneered structural learning

Y

• Eliezer Yudkowsky , Founding figure of the AI alignment community; co-founder of MIRI