Prof. Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), died on Sunday because of cerebral hemorrhage. He was 88 years old.
Minsky's death was confirmed by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte through an email he sent to colleagues.
"With great great sadness, I have to report that Marvin Minsky died last night," he wrote. "The world has lost one of its greatest minds in science."
Negroponte described Minsky as someone who saw the world differently than other people, and that he was able to bring equal measures of deep thinking and humor as a founding member of the MIT Media Lab.
Computer scientist Alan Kay, who was a friend and colleague of Minsky's, said that the veteran educator's visions and perspectives helped liberate the computer from its reputation as a "glorified adding machine" and realize its potential as a very powerful tool for human endeavors.
Work On Artificial Intelligence
Minsky is considered as one of the first scientists to do work on artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956, he attended a Dartmouth symposium, which later became known as the event that helped popularized the concept of AI.
In 1959, Minsky and his colleague John McCarthy co-founded MIT's Artificial Intelligence Project, which became known as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
He would later write some of the most influential books on the subject such as "Perceptrons" in 1969, "The Society of Mind" in 1986 and "The Emotion Machine" in 2006. Many of Minsky's colleagues view these works as important to understanding what developers have to face in creating intelligence for machines.
During his lifetime, Minsky helped develop several technological devices such as the Confocal Scanning Microscope and the SNARC, which is first ever neural network simulator to be created. He also collaborated with fellow educator Edward Fredkin in creating the Triadex Muse synthesizer.
Minsky was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors, among other scientific organizations.
Some of the recognitions he received include ACM Turing Award, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, the Japan Prize and the MIT Killian Award.
Photo: Andreas Schepers | Flickr
