These days, artificial intelligence is a hot topic on the news, social media, our workplaces, and our conversations. Yet AI has a long history. One of its pioneers, Dr. Terry Winograd, has been engaging it for well over 50 years.

After finishing his doctorate at MIT, Terry was hired by Stanford University to teach computer science. He’s now professor emeritus at Stanford where he spent the bulk of his career teaching and contributing mightily to the field of computer science. And just to give you a sense of his international impact, let’s consider the h-index, a way to measure the impact of a person’s research. An h-index of 40 is considered outstanding while an h-index of 60 is considered truly exceptional. Terry’s is 70, which means his research made a massive splash and has been frequently cited in order to further knowledge on his subject.

And while at Stanford, two of his doctoral students were none other than Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who would later go on to found Google. You’ll hear that story and so many others.

So, listen in as Terry and I talk about AI and Google, then and now.

Sources: https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/h-number.html and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10025721/#:~:text=It%20is%20simple%20to%20calculate,had%20h%2Dindex%20of%2030.

#222 AI: Its History & Future + Google's Backstory | Terry Winograd, PhD