Dr. Doug Lenat, a 1968 graduate of Cheltenham High School and one of America’s leading computer scientists and researchers in artificial intelligence, died from cancer on Thursday, August 31 in Austin, Texas. He was 72.
Dr. Lenat was the founder and CEO of the Austin-based artificial intelligence company Cycorp. He founded the company to catalog human common sense and develop machines with the ability to learn it. He spent nearly 40 years trying to build common sense into computers, recreating human judgement one logical rule at a time.
“If computers were human, they’d present themselves as autistic, schizophrenic, or otherwise brittle. It would be unwise or dangerous for that person to take care of children and cook meals, but it’s on the horizon for home robots. That’s like saying, ‘We have an important job to do, but we’re going to hire dogs and cats to do it’,” Dr. Lenat told Business Insider in 2020.
According to local historian Chuck Langerman, during his days at Cheltenham he worked an after-school job at then-Beaver College (now Arcadia University) cleaning rat cages and goose pens, the drudgery of which motivated him to learn to program as a path to a better after-school job, and eventually, a better career.
Dr. Lenat received his bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Physics and his master’s degree in Applied Mathematics, all in 1972, from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his doctorate in Computer Science at Stanford University where he went on to teach.
His career honors include the biennial IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the highest honor in artificial intelligence; the first Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); and a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Cognitive Science Society.
He authored over one hundred publications primarily in the areas of machine learning, automatic program synthesis, knowledge-based systems, representation, and automated inference, and he was an editor of the J. Automated Reasoning, J. Learning Sciences, J. Applied Ontology, J. Applied Artificial Intelligence, and the Springer Artificial Intelligence series of books.
His passing was chronicled by The New York Times in an article titled “Douglas Lenat, Who Tried to Make A.I. More Human, Dies at 72”. An excerpt:
In recent years, the Cyc project — and the rule-based approach to A.I. research it represented — has fallen out of favor among leading A.I. researchers. Rather than defining intelligence rule by rule, line of code by line of code, the giants of the tech industry are now focused on systems that learn skills by analyzing massive amounts of digital data. This is how they build popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
Many researchers now believe that this kind of sweeping data analysis will eventually reproduce common sense and reasoning. But as today’s computers struggle with even simple tasks and play fast and loose with the truth, others believe that the industry can learn from Dr. Lenat and his never-ending struggle to build common sense by hand.
For Dr. Lenat’s articles for Forbes, you can click here. To watch a 2022 interview with Lex Fridman, you can check out the video below:
Fun Fact: Dr. Lenat is the only individual to serve on the Scientific Advisory Boards of both Microsoft and Apple.
For all the latest news, follow us on Facebook or sign up for Glenside Local’s “Daily Buzz” newsletter here.
Photo courtesy of LinkedIn.com