Feigenbaum Wins IEEE Pioneer Award

Edward Feigenbaum, known as the father of expert systems, Stanford Professor Emeritus, has been awarded the Computer Society Pioneer Award.    We consulted with him on the use of expert systems for some of our earliest knowledge systems in the 1980s, and his Teknowledge startup, resulting in millions of dollars in savings.  " ... he and Nobel laureate biologist Joshua Lederberg started the DENDRAL project, producing the world's first expert system. DENDRAL's groundbreaking accomplishments inspired an evolution of expert systems, moving artificial intelligence out of the laboratory and into countless software applications. It also changed the framework of AI science: the power of an AI program came to be seen as largely in its knowledge base, not in its inference processes. ... "  We studied the Dendral system as an example of expertise systems.    Although somewhat before their time then, they have formed the basis for systems like IBM's Watson.