Joseph Weizenbaum

A professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1965 Weizenbaum wrote a program that mimicked understanding of human language. ELIZA (named after the My Fair Lady character) acted like a therapist, prompting human users to talk about their problems. But Weizenbaum was horrified when he saw students took the program seriously, pouring their hearts out to the unthinking, unfeeling computer. "No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms," Weizenbaum said later. His critiques of artificial intelligence drove a wedge between him and the rest of the A.I. community, and he took the title "heretic" with pride. He received the Award for Professional and Social Responsibility given by the Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility in 1988. Weizenbaum moved back to Germany in 1996; he had fled as a boy with his family to escape the Nazis. He died March 5 from cancer in Germany at 85. From This is True for 9 March 2008 Suggestions for further reading: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers... by Norman Doidge Amazon Price: $11.52 Customer Review: Doidge makes a convincing case for neuroplasticity by presenting a wealth of research evidence and case studies that show the brain continually changes itself *throughout a person's life* (hence the title). His book shows that the human brain is more...   Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) by Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig Amazon Price: $104.65 Customer Review: I'm finishing up my CS Master's and this is one of the most confusing and opaque books I have had to deal with. Everything is overly complicated, poorly explained and lacking in examples. We will work through problems in class that are as easy as a...   Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter Amazon Price: $15.61 Customer Review: I've read this book, on and off, over the better part of the last 4 years. It is certainly a fascinating read, the kind of book that effortlessly discusses everything from computers to art, from paradoxes to physics, from philosophy to tortoises, an...   Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics) by Christopher M. Bishop Amazon Price: $76.03 Customer Review: This is a fairly good reference for freshman graduate students for many machine learning topics. The materials are well presented.   Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics, 2nd Edition by Brian Clifton Amazon Price: $26.39 Customer Review: This has been an excellent book in breath, even for someone that has used Google Analytics for 2 years. We started tracking offline activity (table tents, posters, newspaper ads) to our website through the use of vanity (or coded) URLs after reading ...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

About the HUs About This is True Subscribe Free to This is True Your E-mail: Prev: Wingman Donald Lopez Next: Scifi master Arthur C. Clarke Complete Name List

Copyright 1998-2010 ThisisTrue.Inc, all rights reserved. May not be copied or archived without express, prior, written permission. "This is True" is a registered trademark of ThisisTrue.Inc, Ridgway Colorado. 9551