Oliver Selfridge

Oliver Selfridge

A British-American computer scientist, often called the father of machine perception, whose 1959 Pandemonium model proposed recognising patterns through a hierarchy of simple parallel agents, "demons", each shouting when it detected a feature it was looking for, with higher-level demons listening for combinations of those shouts. It was one of the first explicit descriptions of layered feature detection, the structure that convolutional networks later implemented with learned weights. A student of Norbert Wiener, he also helped organise the 1956 Dartmouth workshop. (See also: Frank Rosenblatt, Neural network, Deep learning, Norbert Wiener)