A pioneer of research in Artificial Intelligence Jordan W. Bennett Comp Winter 2011

 Marvin Lee Minsky was born into a Jewish family August 9 th, 1927 in Ney York, NY.  His father was a successful eye surgeon, his mother, a Jewish activist.  Marvin attended three separate grade school institutions throughout his youth.  The Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an Ivy League preparatory in New York city.  The Bronx High School of Science, a public school in Bedford Park, Bronx, renowned for its discipline in Math and Science.  Phillips Academy, a boarding school and member of the G20 schools group, located in Andover, Mass.

 From Minsky served in the United States Navy, completing his basic training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. In an interview with New Yorker reporter Jeremy Bernstein he stated “They provided my first, and essentially my last, contact with nonacademic people.”  He was accepted to Harvard University in 1946 with ambitions to major in physics. He graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Mathematics.

 Minsky began his doctorate studies at Princeton in During his time there he built SNARC (Scholastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Computer). This was the first artificial Neural Network. This became essential to development in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Neural Network

 In his doctorate studies, Minsky attempted to extract human attributes, such as logic and reason, and implement them in a “learning machine” (SNARC). If successful, this machine, would be able to make rational decisions based on past results stored in its memory.  Marvin completed his graduate studies and received his PhD in Mathematics from Princeton in His doctoral dissertation “Neural Nets and The Brain Model Problem” was published the same year.

 After completing his PhD at Princeton, Dr. Minsky accepted a three year junior fellowship back at Harvard, strictly to work with microscopes and develop his theorems.  Within these three years Marvin accomplished a patent on the Confocal Scanning Microscope. This is one of many inventions.

 In 1958 Marvin joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor of Mathematics.  With the help of John McCarthy, he founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project in 1959 which became the MIT AI Lab in  Remained director of the a lab until 1974 before he was named Donner professor of science in the department of electrical engineering and computer science.

 In 1989 he moved to MIT Media Arts where he became Toshiba professor of Media Arts and Sciences.  He remains in this position still today. MIT Media Lab

 The term “Artificial Intelligence” was first used by John McCarthy in  It is the study and applied use of technology used to build intelligent/humanoid machines.  The goal is that these machines would be able to examine their surroundings and make decisions that would optimize their chance of accomplishing a specific task in the most efficient way possible.  McCarthy describes it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” John McCarthy

 Diversity of Methods used for problem solving among researchers and institutions.  An extremely vast study with many sub subjects. The majority of the time, these sub divisions do not communicate their findings with each other.  Ethics come into question when attempting to recreate the workings of the mind.

 Lack of focus on one common goal within the study of AI.  Repairing “bugs” rather than developing systems without “bugs”  Most of our developments in the field have only revolved around one problem at a time. Thus, each “intelligent machine” is built for one specific task.

 When AI Research began it was dominated by the MIT AI Research Project.  Minsky made huge contributions in many sectors of this study including:  Visual Perception  Computational Geometry  Basic theories of AI and Computation

 He founded Logo, which is used to teach computer programming to children and also helped found the Thinking Machines Corporation.  He devoted much of his intellectual energy in developing his theories that say consciousness is only an illusion and that there is no difference between humans and machines.

 Turing Award (1969)  Japan Prize (1990)  IJCAI Award for research excellence (1991)  Benjamin Franklin Medal

 Perceptrons – 1969  Communication with Alien intelligence – 1985  The Society of Mind – 1987  The Emotion Machine

    Science in the Contemporary World: an Encyclopedia by Eric Gottfrid Swedin