Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin () (born March 23, 1959) is an American retired

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and the inventor of the

Lycos Lycos, Inc. (stylized as LYCOS), is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company ...

web search engine. He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language processing, autonomous information agents,

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

, and

expert system In artificial intelligence (AI), an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as ...

s. He is also one of the authors of '' Rog-O-Matic'' and ''Julia'', a

Turing test The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949,. Turing wrote about the ‘imitation game’ centrally and extensively throughout his 1950 text, but apparently retired the term thereafter. He referred to ‘ iste ...

competitor in the Loebner Prize. Verbot, a defunct

chatbot A chatbot (originally chatterbot) is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of main ...

program, is based on Mauldin's work. Mauldin is an active competitor in the Robot Fighting League.

Early life and education

Mauldin was born on March 23, 1959, in

Dallas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

, Texas, to Jimmie Alton Mauldin and Marilyn Jean Taylor. In 1974 the family moved to

Midland, Texas Midland is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat of Midland County with small portions extending into Martin County. The population was 132,524 as of the 2020 census. Located in the Permian Basin in West Texas, Midland is a ...

and Michael enrolled in Midland High School and graduated valedictorian in 1977. In 1981, he received a

bachelor's degree A bachelor's degree (from Medieval Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six years ...

from

Rice University William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University, is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas, United States. Established in 1912, the university spans 300 acres. Rice University comp ...

. In 1983, he received

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional prac ...

and in 1989, he received a Ph.D., both from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

(CMU). His Ph.D. advisor was

Jaime Carbonell Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation resul ...

Career

In 1994, while working at CMU on the Informedia Digital Library project, Mauldin created Lycos from 3 pages of code. Along with CMU, he sold 80% of the company to CMGI for $2 million. In 1996, Lycos was the fastest company ever to become a

public company A public company is a company whose ownership is organized via shares of share capital, stock which are intended to be freely traded on a stock exchange or in over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter markets. A public (publicly traded) co ...

via an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...

. Mauldin sold his stake in Lycos during the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Interne ...

and retired. In 1997, he left Lycos to form Conversive with Peter Plantec. The company was an

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

software company that created self-animated computer-generated human characters. He remained on the

board of directors A board of directors is a governing body that supervises the activities of a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government agency. The powers, duties, and responsibilities of a board of directors are determined by government regulatio ...

of the company until 2013, when it was acquired by Avaya. In 2000, after watching '' BattleBots'', Mauldin built a robot and became a successful competitor in robot combat. In August 2015, he became a member of the board of directors of Lycos, now owned by Suresh Reddy. In 2017, he appeared on '' Robot Wars'' as the team captain for the "rest of the world" team.

Patents

Mauldin is the inventor or co-inventor of the following 4 patents: * US 5,748,954 - "Method for searching a queued and ranked constructed catalog of files stored on a network" * US 5,835,667 - "Method and apparatus for creating a searchable digital video library and a system and method of using such a library" * US 5,664,227 - "System and method for skimming digital audio/video data" * US 7,253,817 - "Virtual human interface for conducting surveys"

Personal life

Mauldin is married to Debbie and they have grown children. In addition to robot combat, they enjoy traveling via recreational vehicle and driving his Jeep Wrangler Sahara through the desert. They owned an 81-acre ranch near

Austin, Texas Austin ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and W ...

. He is also an active bowler with a Brunswick Pearl engraved with his name "Fuzzy". Mauldin was recruited by

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

but opted to stay retired.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mauldin, Michael Loren 1959 births American computer scientists Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people Rice University alumni