Peter Norvig Joins Stanford HAI

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/peter-norvig-todays-most-pressing-questions-ai-are-human-centered

by azhenley • 5 years ago

469 105 5 years ago

hai.stanford.edu

metagame10• 5 years ago

For anyone not in the loop, Norvig was the author of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. This was a substantial contribution to the field of educational computer science literature, and helped to kickstart the idea that the way to learn is to read, not just write.

It's also one of the few AI books that isn't rooted squarely in Algol. It's written with fairly decent though not always portable Common Lisp, just like most Common Lisp books of the era.

It can be read here, in mobi or zipped HTML format: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/releases/tag/1.1

Or here, in PDF: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/releases/tag/v1.0

For a native web copy, abuse Safari Online's free trial. It's what I assume everyone else does when they want to read a niche technical book that O'Reilly put out but doesn't print another run of.

Depending on the day, the book ranges anywhere from $2 to $60 on Amazon, used, if you want a hard copy.

(Edited to fix the very butchered title that I wrote in error initially.)

joshuamorton2• 5 years ago

Also one of the two authors of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is probably the most commonly used intro AI textbook.

metagame10• 5 years ago

I would have mentioned that, but it's mentioned in the Stanford post and is also less interesting from a "You Should Know" standpoint on a website built on a Common Lisp-inspired Lisp. Not to mention that the book isn't as good as PAIP.

kortilla2• 5 years ago

and helped to kickstart the idea that the way to learn is to read, not just write.

Can you expand on this? Nearly every field is learned with extensive reading.

metagame10• 5 years ago

Computer science, historically, has been a field filled with books that encourage you to write code while not particularly having you read much of it. K&R is a good example of this. PAIP went against this notion, and has you spend much of the book reading code.

Yes, this is taking the way learning is done in almost every case and field and applying it to programming. No, it still hasn't really caught on universally in computer science.

zerocount• 5 years ago

Norvig presents complete programs for the reader to read and make changes to, instead of small snippets to practice with. You read more trying to comprehind the program.

pronoiac• 5 years ago

Hey there! I'm one of the folks who's worked / working on making PAIP readable online. The Safari version is captured in the epub version, so no trial is needed.

metagame10• 5 years ago

Yes, I know. That's why I pointed out that zipped HTML was available, but that's not quite a native web copy! Especially given how the zipped HTML in the epub format is usually presented (a million tiny HTML files in a single directory).

rags2riches• 5 years ago

Norvig is also the guy in a colorful shirt you can spot in many Google TechTalks!

nothrowaways4• 5 years ago

Artificial Intelligence modern approach is also a great book.

geokon• 5 years ago

It's ~500 pages vs. ~2.5k pages...

the former already seems like a big project - the latter sounds impossible. (I'm assuming you're not skimming and actually doing the problem sets)

Is that in rambling prose? Dense math?

justicezyx2• 5 years ago

I suspect Peter should have left Google long ago.

Google's approach to ML/AI probably is not what Peter really liked, judging from his past writings and books. There is certainly a strong sense of symbolic and rule-based intelligence, based on my limited reading and even more limited understanding.

But I guess Google paid very well... In reality, Google probably should sponsor Peter and let him work at Stanford...

nl• 5 years ago

Given that Norvig was one of the authors of "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"[1] and his famous statistical spell checker[2] are both about showing how rule and symbolic intelligence doesn't work I don't think your thesis is quite correct.

[1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

[2] https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html

axpy906• 5 years ago

I think they referred to him internally which makes sense. I follow him on LinkedIn and most of the posts are about GCS AI services, which is external facing.

vl• 5 years ago

When I was at Google I never heard Norvig’s name in connection with anything. At any internal AI conferences Jeff Dean would be present, Kurzweil, etc., but never Norvig.

nothrowaways4• 5 years ago

Rule based and all was long ago before data was so much abundant. Or in other words before big data era.

jamestimmins• 5 years ago

He created one of the first courses on Udacity, Design of Computer Programs. It's free and quite good, from what I hear.

https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

donkey-hotei• 5 years ago

Yes. Very good, & also challenging :) Highly recommend

nick0garvey• 5 years ago

Agreed, this class was a masterpiece. Changed the way I write software

alphabetting• 5 years ago

Big get for Stanford

thuccess129• 5 years ago

The Pentagon software developers with a Kindergarten grade education in Ai can route through Stanford as part of their professional development and climb the career ladder.

brchr• 5 years ago

Current title ("Peter Norvig Leaves Google to Join Stanford HAI") seems to overstate slightly. According to Peter: "I still have my affiliation with Google, but will spend most of my time at Stanford."

justicezyx2• 5 years ago

Wow, the title is so wrong...

lsb• 5 years ago

Do you have a link?

dang• 5 years ago

Ok, we've taken 'leaves' out of the title.

sjg007• 5 years ago

Made a few million and can afford to be a professor again. :). Academic life is the best life.

user3939382• 5 years ago

While we're on the topic, one of my favorite blog posts of all time is his "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

nekopa• 5 years ago

It's funny you mention this, as there is a big thread above that discusses his contribution to learning by reading, and his second point here is "Program. The best type of learning is learning by doing".

ineedasername• 5 years ago

in Ten Years

That sounds about right. Whenever I have to revisit code I wrote more than 3+ years ago I tend to think "Why the hell did I do it that way?"

Occasionally, now knowing the trend, I'll even comment in an apology to my future self. When I encounter those past comments my general sentiment is something like "yeah, thanks for the spaghetti asshole, would half a day to clean this up have really been so hard?"

And sometimes I remember the circumstances of that spaghetti, boiled around 2:00 AM, and remember "nope, wasn't time". Even though now I can do it better and faster.

crazy5sheep• 5 years ago

Same here, I was inspired a lot by this post all these years. I really want to take this chance to say than you to Peter.

didip• 5 years ago

What did Norvig do at Google, anyone knows?

m0zg• 5 years ago

Probably the same thing such folks do elsewhere: allowed some very smart people to not step on the rakes quite as often, and be even smarter by providing perspective and advice.

norvig2• 5 years ago

I ran Search for 5 years or so; then ran all of Research for the next 5; then had an increasing smaller portion of a huge growing Research initiative. This past year I enjoyed mentoring startups in ML through the Google for Startups program. But m0gz got it pretty much right.

nothrowaways4• 5 years ago

Did your job require you to code?

How did you manage to keep sharp at coding?

lostmsu2• 5 years ago

Sorry for a snarky comment, but doesn't that cover the time when HN started noticing, that search stopped returning results for the query that was requested, and instead started to be "too clever" about it with no way to override?

nostrademons2• 5 years ago

He was their first Director of Search Quality, and then switched to being Director of Research. IIRC he had a VP over him when I left (2014), but was still largely calling the shots in Research. Google Research had some very large wins come out of them in the mid/late 00s - their speech recognition and machine translation programs came out of that.

AIUI Norvig was also instrumental in Google's research philosophy, which is to embed research teams alongside the products they're developing rather than having a separate research lab that throws papers over the wall for later implementation. Somewhat ironic, given that he ended up heading the dedicated Research department, but Research was viewed as sort of an incubator whose successful projects would be "adopted" by some other product team. He's the reason machine-learning is pervasive at Google and ordinary SWEs use TensorFlow, rather than it being the sole province of Ph.Ds.

vram22• 5 years ago

I saw that others, including he, replied, but, fun fact, this snippet has been on his site for years:

"Note to recruiters: Please don't offer me a job. I already have the best job in the world at the best company in the world. Note to engineers and researchers: see why." (sic)

lkkjwokljfow391• 5 years ago

Congratulations Peter!

I was first introduced to Mr. Norvig when taking a MOOC course (Intro to AI). There I witnessed his approach to problem solving and his clever & elegant solutions. I couldn't help but be in awe.

norvig2• 5 years ago

"Joins Stanford HAI" is correct; "Leaves Google" is not right–I'm keeping my Google badge, but will spend most of my time at Stanford.

jcims3• 5 years ago

Hey Dr Norvig, really enjoyed your podcast episode with Lex Fridman a couple of years ago. Once you get settled in it would be great to hear an update with how its going, some color around the background and objectives of the program and maybe just riff on the subject for a bit. Thanks!

phreeza6• 5 years ago

I think sadly Fridman has since left the path of conducting interesting interviews with accomplished AI researchers and now caters to a kind of vapid pseudo-philosophical TED-talk crowd.

peter_retief• 5 years ago

Nice Peter.

andyxor• 5 years ago

Big fan of your spellchecker

Alekhine• 5 years ago

One great reason to come to HN is that you can find a thread on any tech personality, and semi often they'll just show up in the comments.

de_nied• 5 years ago

We're quirky like that.

ngcc_hk• 5 years ago

After reading and running his code etc, it is a shock to see him turn up here.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

I almost answered "who are you to talk about P.N." to his own comment :cough:

nothrowaways4• 5 years ago

A huge fan of those string algorithms and Those notebooks. Real craftsmanship.

9387367• 5 years ago

norvig.com is protected by Imunify360
We have noticed an unusual activity from your IP and blocked access to this website.

ZhangSWEFAANG• 5 years ago

'One way to think of AI is as a process of optimization — finding the course of action, in an uncertain world, that will result in the maximum expected utility"

This specifically reminds me of reinforcement learning.

"Now that we have a great set of algorithms and tools, the more pressing questions are human-centered: Exactly what do you want to optimize? Whose interests are you serving? Are you being fair to everyone? Is anyone being left out? Is the data you collected inclusive, or is it biased?"

This is like a meta-view of automation. When tasks were automated, people were able to do higher order thinking. For example, when people no longer had to do menial excel spreadsheets work, they were able to glean more meaningful insights from the data.

"The next challenge is to reach people who lack self-confidence, who don’t see themselves as capable of learning new things and being successful, who think of the tech world as being for others, not them"

This is the same insight Ajay Bangha (CEO of mastercard) made on giving financial access to the Next Billion Users.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

Wonderful for the students who he will teach. Kind of off topic, but his positive attitude in this short interview towards training AI workers reminds me of the same positivism in parts of the new book AI 2041. I also like the focus on training practitioners. I am 70 years old, but I still look forward to work every morning as a deep learning engineer.

pvaldes• 5 years ago

Hum, We talk about the same Peter Norvig that is an expert in cetaceans?

Peter Norvig Joins Stanford HAI

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