Theorizing from Data: Avoiding the Capital Mistake
Speaker: Peter Norvig , Google, Inc.
Date: March 14 2007
Time: 11:00AM to 12:00PM
Location: 32-G449/Patil Conference Room
Host: Victor Zue, CSAIL
Contact: Victoria Palay, 617 253 8924, palay@csail.mit.edu
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle's words from 1891 remain true today. Researchers in
computational linguistics and information retrieval now have a million times more data than was available 30 years ago. This talk explores what this data can do for problems in language understanding,
translation, information extraction, and inference, and extrapolates
to what more data may bring in the future.
Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google Inc, where he has been since 2001. From 2002-2005 he was Director of Search Quality, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field (with 94% market share).
Previously he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, making him NASA's senior computer scientist. He received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He has served as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley Computer Science Department, from which he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the distinguished alumni award in 2006. He has over fifty publications in Computer Science, concentrating on Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering, including the books Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and the world's longest palindromic sentence.
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