Oliver Selfridge

Who was Oliver Selfridge?

Oliver Gordon Selfridge was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception."

Selfridge, born in England, was a grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges department stores. He was educated at Malvern College in Malvern, Worcestershire, and, upon moving to the U.S.A., at Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, before earning an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at MIT, but did not write up his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D. While at MIT, he acted as one of the earlier reviewers for Wiener's Cybernetics book in 1949. He was also technically a supervisor of Marvin Minsky, and helped organize the first ever public meeting on artificial intelligence with Minsky in 1955.

Selfridge wrote important early papers on neural networks and pattern recognition and machine learning, and his "Pandemonium" paper is generally recognized as a classic in artificial intelligence. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to aspect-oriented programming.