Edward Albert Feigenbaum, (born January 20, 1936, Wehawken, New Jersey, U.S.), an American programs analyst and a very powerful pioneer within the growth of professional programs in synthetic intelligence (AI).
The son of an accountant, Feigenbaum was particularly fascinated with how his father’s including machine may reproduce human calculations. Given his early curiosity in cognition, Feigenbaum’s enrollment on the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1952 positioned him in the appropriate place on the proper time. After receiving an engineering diploma in 1956, he remained to finish a doctorate in 1960 with Herbert Simon, one among AI’s founding fathers and later a Nobel Prize winner.
Feigenbaum spent the following 5 years educating within the enterprise faculty on the University of California, Berkeley. Although his doctoral thesis involved synthetic intelligence, his Ph.D. had been awarded in industrial administration. Dissatisfied by the dearth of a laptop science program at Berkeley, in 1965 he moved throughout San Francisco Bay to Stanford University, which proved a way more congenial atmosphere for his AI pursuits.
On his arrival at Stanford, Feigenbaum based the Knowledge Systems Laboratory to start the work for which he would change into well-known: the event of professional programs, laptop packages that show the data of a human professional in a specialised area. Feigenbaum’s first main success, DENDRAL (from the Greek phrase for “tree”), took greater than 10 years to develop. Designed in collaboration with the Stanford geneticist Joshua Lederberg and the chemist and inventor of the primary business oral contraceptive, Carl Djerassi, DENDRAL was meant to assist chemists in figuring out the construction of natural molecules. Through using a posh array of “if-then” guidelines, DENDRAL generated a “branching tree” to assist analyze interstellar mass spectrometry knowledge within the seek for proof of extraterrestrial life. DENDRAL made clear that an professional system is just nearly as good as its guidelines. To get hold of the appropriate guidelines for an professional system equivalent to DENDRAL, Feigenbaum and his college students needed to conduct intensive interviews with consultants to confirm the implicit and infrequently unconscious data utilized in reaching a call. This interview course of acquired the identify data engineering, a phrase that captures the essence of the energetic strategy of designing an professional system.
Experience with DENDRAL knowledgeable the creation of Feigenbaum’s subsequent professional system, MYCIN, which assisted physicians in diagnosing blood infections. MYCIN’s nice accomplishment lay in demonstrating that usually the secret is not reasoning however understanding. That is, understanding what signs correspond to every illness is mostly extra vital than understanding illness etiology. At a fundamental stage, MYCIN additionally demonstrated that the technique of navigating the reasoning tree and the contents of the completely different branches could be handled individually.
The insights garnered from these early packages allowed professional programs to emerge from the laboratory and into {the marketplace} as the primary profitable business AI merchandise. Expert programs have performed a task in lots of manufacturing industries in addition to the army, as evidenced by Feigenbaum’s appointment because the U.S. Air Force chief scientist from 1994 to 1997.
Feigenbaum’s autobiographical A Personal View of Expert Systems: Looking Back and Looking Ahead (1992) is an interesting account of his profession with many helpful references. In 1994 Feigenbaum acquired the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.