Edward Feigenbaum


Edward Albert "Ed" Feigenbaum is a computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and joint winner of the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems."

Education and early life

Feigenbaum was born in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1936 to a culturally Jewish family, and moved to nearby North Bergen, where he lived until the age of 16, when he left to start college. His hometown didn't have a secondary school of its own and he chose Weehawken High School for its college preparatory program. He was inducted into his high school's hall of fame in 1996.
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his Ph.D thesis, carried out under the supervision of Herbert A. Simon, he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn.

Career and research

Feigenbaum completed a Fulbright Fellowship at the National Physics Laboratory and in 1960 went to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach in the School of Business Administration. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1965 as one of the founders of its computer science department. He was the director of the Stanford Computation Center from 1965 to 1968. He established the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. Important projects that Ed was involved in include systems in medicine, as ACME, Mycin, SUMEX, and Dendral. He also co-founded companies IntelliCorp and Teknowledge.
Since 2000 Ed Feigenbaum is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His former doctoral students include Peter Karp, Niklaus Wirth, and Alon Halevy.

Honors and awards