Joseph Weizenbaum

Joseph Weizenbaum (8 January 1923 – 5 March 2008) was a German-American computer scientist and a professor at MIT. He is the namesake of the Weizenbaum Award and the Weizenbaum Institute.

Life and career

Born in Berlin, Germany to Jewish parents, he escaped Nazi Germany in January 1936, immigrating with his family to the United States. He started studying mathematics in 1941 at Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan. In 1942, he interrupted his studies to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a meteorologist, having been turned down for cryptology work because of his "enemy alien" status. After the war, in 1946, he returned to Wayne State, obtaining his B.S. in Mathematics in 1948, and his M.S. in 1950.

Around 1952, as a research assistant at Wayne, Weizenbaum worked on analog computers and helped create a digital computer. In 1956, he worked for General Electric on ERMA, a computer system that introduced the use of the magnetically encoded fonts imprinted on the bottom border of checks, allowing automated check processing via magnetic ink character recognition (MICR). He published a short paper in Datamation in 1962 entitled "How to Make a Computer Appear Intelligent" that described the strategy used in a Gomoku program that could beat novice players.

In 1963 he took a position of associate professor at MIT on the strength of his SLIP (Symmetric List Processing) software. Within four years, he had been awarded tenure and a full professorship in computer science and engineering (in 1970). In addition to working at MIT, Weizenbaum held academic appointments at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Bremen, and other universities.

Psychology simulation at MIT

In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA, named after the ingénue in George Bernard Shaw's '' Pygmalion'', which could chat to the user. ELIZA was written in the SLIP programming language of Weizenbaum's own creation. The program applied pattern matching rules to statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatbots.) Driven by a script named DOCTOR, it was capable of engaging humans in a conversation which bore a striking resemblance to one with an empathic psychologist. Weizenbaum modeled its conversational style after Carl Rogers, who introduced the use of open-ended questions to encourage patients to communicate more effectively with therapists. He was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. Famously, when he was observing his secretary using the software – who was aware that it was a simulation – she asked Weizenbaum: "would you mind leaving the room please?" Many hailed the program as a forerunner of thinking machines, a misguided interpretation that Weizenbaum's later writing would attempt to correct.Bank of America