Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Feigenbaum

An American computer scientist known as the father of expert systems, who argued that intelligent behaviour comes less from clever reasoning than from large quantities of domain knowledge, and set out to capture it. His Stanford Heuristic Programming Project produced DENDRAL, which inferred molecular structures from mass spectrometry data, and seeded MYCIN and the wave of commercial expert systems that followed. The discipline he named, knowledge engineering, interviewing specialists and encoding their rules, dominated applied AI through the 1970s and 1980s. He shared the 1994 Turing Award with Raj Reddy. (See also: Expert system, Symbolic AI, Ontology)