MIT World Speakers

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky is one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and helped establish in 1959 what would become the MIT AI Lab.

Minsky has made many groundbreaking contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in The Society of Mind (CD-ROM, book) which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT.

Other works include Matter, Mind, and Models (1963), A Framework for Representing Knowledge (1974), and his latest book, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind.

Minsky holds a B.A. (Harvard, 1949) and Ph.D. (Princeton, 1954), both in Mathematics. Among the many honors he has received are the ACM Turing Award, the Japan Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. He also is the inventor of the widely used Confocal Scanning Microscope.