Peter E. Hart (born 1941) is an American

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 entrepreneur. He was chairman and president of Ricoh Innovations, which he founded in 1997. He made significant contributions in the field of computer science in a series of widely cited publications from the years 1967 to 1975 while associated with the

Artificial Intelligence Center The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the ...

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

, a laboratory where he also served as director.

Education

Hart studied at

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (; RPI) is a private university, private research university in Troy, New York, United States. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was establishe ...

, leading to a BEE degree (1962). He did his graduate studies at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, where he got his MS (1963) and PhD (1966); Thomas M. Cover was his advisor and discovered & co-published a seminal paper on 1-NN nearest neighbor search."Nearest neighbor pattern classification"
Cover & Hart 1967
IEEE

Career

While at the

, Hart co-authored 20 papers, among them the initial exposition of the A* search algorithm and the variant of the Hough transform now widely used in computer vision for finding straight line segments in images. He also contributed to the development of Shakey the Robot. Hart and Richard O. Duda are the authors of "Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis", originally published in 1973. This classic text is a widely cited reference, and the first edition was in print for over 25 years until being superseded by the second edition in 2000. A strong advocate of artificial intelligence in industry, Hart was the founding director of the Fairchild/Schlumberger Artificial Intelligence Center and co-founder of Syntelligence, a company specializing in expert systems for financial risk analysis. Hart is currently Group Senior Vice President at the

Ricoh is a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company. It was founded by the now-defunct commercial division of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) known as the ''Riken Concern'', on 6 February 1936 as . Ricoh's hea ...

Company, Ltd.

Memberships and awards

Hart is an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

, an

ACM Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

and an

AAAI The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

Fellow.

References

External links

Hart's personal web page

Hart's web page at Ricoh Innovations
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hart, Peter E American engineering writers Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Stanford University alumni Living people SRI International people Fellows of the IEEE 2003 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 1941 births