Oliver Selfridge, one of the leading lights in the early days of artificial intelligence, died Wednesday in Boston. Born in 1926, Selfridge attended Middlesex School in Concord and graduated from MIT at the age of 19 with a degree in mathematics. In 1956, he and a group of colleagues (among them Marvin Minsky) organized the first public meeting on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth, leading to the creation of the field.
Mr. Selfridge spent a great deal of his career at Lincoln Labs and MIT, where he was associate director of Project MAC, CSAIL’s parent initiative. He also served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Security Agency, where he held the chairship of the Data Security Panel. And as well as being a well-published science author, Mr. Selfridge was also a writer of children’s book. He is survived by his companion, three children, a sister, and six grandchildren. To read his full obituary at the New York Times, please click here.