Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence, died

Marvin Minsky, the pioneer of artificial intelligence, died on 24 January 2016 at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital due to cerebral hemorrhage. The mathematician and the computer scientist died at the age of 88.

Minsky, a professor emeritus at the MIT Media Lab, helped in work that helped inspired the creation of the personal computer and the Internet.

About Professor Marvin Minsky
• In 1959, he co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project (AIT) with John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence.” Now AIT is known as Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
• Minsky, a native New Yorker entered Harvard University after returning from service in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
• He was an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) created robotic hands that can manipulate objects, developed new programming frameworks and wrote several texts on AI and philosophy. Some of his books
a) The Society of Mind: The book is considered a seminal exploration of intellectual structure and function, advancing understanding of the diversity of mechanisms interacting in intelligence and thought.
b) The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind
c) Perceptrons: Written with Seymour Papert became the foundational work in the analysis of artificial neural networks.
d) A framework for representing knowledge: The book created a new paradigm in programming.
• Some of his inventions include
a) He developed first head-mounted graphical display (1963)
b) He developed the confocal microscope, a predecessor to today’s widely used confocal laser scanning microscope).
c) He developed, with Seymour Papert, the first Logo turtle.
d) In 1951, he built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine, SNARC.

Awards
• Minsky won the AM Turing Award - the highest honor in computer science - in 1969
• The Japan Prize in 1990
• The IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 1991
• The Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001
• In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for co-founding the field of artificial intelligence, creating early neural networks and robots, and developing theories of human and machine cognition
• In 2011, he was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for the "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems"
• In 2014, he won the Dan David Prize in the field of "Artificial Intelligence, the Digital Mind"
• He was also awarded with the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The term Artificial Intelligence coined by John McCarthy in 1955 defines the science and engineering of making intelligent machines. In other words AI is the field that studies the synthesis and analysis of computational agents that act intelligently.

It is also the name of the academic field of study which studies how to create computers and computer software that are capable of intelligent behavior. Major AI researchers and textbooks define this field as "the study and design of intelligent agents", in which an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.

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