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Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) 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 ...
. He is a professor 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 ...
, and co-director of the Stanford
Human–Computer Interaction
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...
Group.
in 1966. He wrote
SHRDLU
SHRDLU is an early natural-language understanding computer program that was developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In the program, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and query ...
as a PhD thesis at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
in the years from 1968–70. In making the program Winograd was concerned with the problem of providing a computer with sufficient "understanding" to be able to use natural language. Winograd built a
blocks world
The blocks world is a planning domain in artificial intelligence. It consists of a set of wooden blocks of various shapes and colors sitting on a table. The goal is to build one or more vertical stacks of blocks. Only one block may be moved at ...
, restricting the program's intellectual world to a simulated "world of toy blocks". The program could accept commands such as, "Find a block which is taller than the one you are holding and put it into the box" and carry out the requested action using a simulated block-moving arm. The program could also respond verbally, for example, "I do not know which block you mean." The SHRDLU program can be viewed historically as one of the classic examples of how difficult it is for a programmer to build up a computer's semantic memory by hand and how limited or "brittle" such programs are.
Research
In 1973, Winograd moved to Stanford University and developed an AI-based framework for understanding natural language which was to give rise to a series of books. But only the first volume (Syntax) was ever published. "What I came to realize is that the success of the communication depends on the real intelligence on the part of the listener, and that there are many other ways of communicating with a computer that can be more effective, given that it doesn’t have the intelligence."
His approach shifted away from classical Artificial Intelligence after encountering the critique of cognitivism by
Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus ( ; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of ...
and meeting with the Chilean philosopher
Fernando Flores. They published a critical appraisal from a perspective based in
phenomenology
Phenomenology may refer to:
Art
* Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties
Philosophy
* Phenomenology (Peirce), a branch of philosophy according to Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 ...
as ''Understanding Computers and Cognition: a new foundation for design'' in 1986. In the latter part of the 1980s, Winograd worked with Flores on an early form of
groupware. Their approach was based on conversation-for-action analysis.
In the early 1980s, Winograd was a founding member and national president of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a group of computer scientists concerned about nuclear weapons,
SDI, and increasing participation by the
U.S. Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD, or DOD) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and supervising the six U.S. armed services: the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Force, t ...
in the field of computer science.
In general, Winograd's work at Stanford has focused on
software design
Software design is the process of conceptualizing how a software system will work before it is implemented or modified.
Software design also refers to the direct result of the design process the concepts of how the software will work which co ...
in a broader sense than
software engineering
Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...
. In 1991 he founded the "Project on People, Computers and Design" in order to promote teaching and research into software design. The book "Bringing Design to Software" describes some of this work. His thesis is that software design is a distinct activity from both analysis and programming, but it should be informed by both, as well as by design practices in other professions (textile design, industrial design, etc.).
Starting in 1995, Winograd served as adviser to Stanford PhD student
Larry Page
Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American businessman, computer engineer and computer scientist best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.
Page was chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 when ...
, who was working on a research project involving web search. In 1998, Page took a leave of absence from Stanford to co-found
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 ...
. In 2002, Winograd took a sabbatical from teaching and spent some time at Google as a visiting researcher. There, he studied the intersection of theory and practice of
human–computer interaction
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is the process through which people operate and engage with computer systems. Research in HCI covers the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and comp ...
.
Recently, Winograd has continued to research collaborative computing, including uses of
ubiquitous computing
Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear seamlessly anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing imp ...
in collaborative work.
Winograd continues to do research at Stanford and teach classes and seminars in human–computer interaction. In addition to the Computer Science Dept., Winograd is associated with the
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, also known as the "d.school", which he helped found.
Awards
He is a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...
(2009) and received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2011.
Lifetime Achievement Award -- Terry Winograd
/ref>
Publications
Books by Terry Winograd
* 1972. ''Understanding Natural Language'' Academic Press, New York.
* 1982. ''Language As A Cognitive Process, Volume 1, Syntax'' Addison-Wesley.
* 1986. ''Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design'' (with Fernando Flores) Ablex Publ Corp.
* 1992. ''Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools'' (with Paul S. Adler) Oxford University Press.
* 1996. ''Bringing Design to Software'' ACM Press.
See also
* Winograd schema challenge
References
External links
Oral history interview with Terry Allen Winograd
Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis—65-page interview describes his education, first in liberal arts at Colorado College and then in computer science and introduction to linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He discusses the work of Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist, cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research in artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...
and others in artificial intelligence. He describes his move to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his additional linguistic research at Xerox-PARC. Winograd compares the approach to artificial intelligence at MIT and Stanford. He describes his involvement with obtaining funding from the Information Processing Techniques Office
The Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), originally "Command and Control Research",Lyon, Matthew; Hafner, Katie (1999-08-19). ''Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet'' (p. 39). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. was par ...
of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...
.
Stanford HCI Group
Terry Winograd's faculty page
Interviewed by Morten Thanning Vendelø
Siri, Who is Terry Winograd
a 2017 ''strategy+business
Strategy (from Ancient Greek, Greek στρατηγία ''stratēgia'', "troop leadership; office of general, command, generalship") is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sens ...
'' magazine "creative mind" profile of Winograd's remarkably fruitful 40-year career as a pioneer of the fraught and vital labor of human–computer interaction.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Winograd, Terry
1946 births
Living people
American artificial intelligence researchers
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
American cognitive scientists
Colorado College alumni
Jewish American scientists
20th-century American Jews
Human–computer interaction researchers
Google employees
Stanford University School of Engineering faculty
Communication theorists
American computer scientists
2009 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
People from Takoma Park, Maryland
21st-century American Jews