Textbook of AI

1943–2019, AI researcher, MIT educator

Also known as: Patrick Henry Winston

Patrick Henry Winston was an American AI researcher who directed the MIT AI Lab from 1972 to 1997. His 1970 PhD thesis on structural learning trained a system to learn the concept of "arch" from a small number of positive and negative blocks-world examples, an early demonstration of one-shot conceptual learning that anticipated later work in inductive logic programming and few-shot learning.

Winston wrote the first edition of Artificial Intelligence (Addison-Wesley, 1977), the leading AI textbook before Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (1995) replaced it. His later work focused on story understanding and the Genesis system, and his lectures on AI, recorded for MIT OpenCourseWare, remain widely watched ten years after they were delivered.