Patrick Winston

Who is Patrick Winston?

Patrick Henry Winston is an American computer scientist, and is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab and succeeded by Rodney Brooks. Brooks assisted with merging the lab with the MIT Lab for Computer Science, to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Winston's thesis work with Marvin Minsky concerned the difficulty of learning; he concluded it was only possible to learn something one nearly already knows. He is active in research and interested in machine learning and human intelligence. Winston is known within the MIT community for his strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture.

As of December 2013, Winston teaches 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston is also an author of a number of CS and AI textbooks, including:

Artificial Intelligence ISBN 0201533774

The Psychology of Computer Vision ISBN 0070710481

Lisp ISBN 0201083191

On to C ISBN 020158042X

On to C++ ISBN 0201580438

On to Java ISBN 0201725932