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: $9.36 Customer Review: This book is well written and very clearly describes some of the recent scientific advancements in the exploration of the human brain. Just great!!   Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter Amazon Price: $15.61 Customer Review: Book was in excellent shape, and delivery was on time. I am thoroughly enjoying it. Very intellectually stimulating.   Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) by Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig Amazon Price: $98.40 Customer Review: Sadly the third eddition feels like part of the textbook racket where new editions are created with more of an aim at increasing profits than increasing quality. Besides that gripe I found the book to be a better than average textbook. I've used it...   The Kimball Group Reader: Relentlessly Practical Tools for Data Warehousing a... by Ralph Kimball, Margy Ross Amazon Price: $38.21 Customer Review: As an architect I have always found the Kimball's books extremely useful as reference materials. This new addition includes a compilation of the many articles written over the years and some additional bits.This is about the current thoughts o...   Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics) by Christopher M. Bishop Amazon Price: $57.36 Customer Review: This is a great reference for machine learning. There are many figures and the treatment is clear and comprehensive. To my knowledge, it is the best treatment available. It's not a perfect treatment, but at this stage in the field's de...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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