Terry Allen Winograd (born February
24, 1946) is a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence
fields for his work on natural language using the SHRDLU program.
SHRDLU was written as a PhD thesis at MIT 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, 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.
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." [1]
His approach shifted away from Artificial Intelligence after meeting
up with the Chilean philosopher Fernando Flores with whom he published
a critical appraisal from a perspective based in phenomenology. In the
latter part of the 1980s, Winograd worked with him 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 in the
field of computer science.[2]
In general, Winograd's work at Stanford has focused on software design
in a broader sense than software engineering. 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[3], who was working on a research project involving web
search. In 1998, Page took a leave of absence from Stanford to
co-found Google. In 2002, Winograd took a sabbatical from teaching and
spent some time at Google as a visiting researcher.[4] There, he
studied the intersection of theory and practice of human-computer
interaction.
Recently, Winograd has continued to research collaborative computing,
including uses of ubiquitous computing in collaborative work. Today,
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 d.school (sic.) which
he helped found.
Books by Terry Winograd
Understanding Natural Language Academic Press, New York, 1972
Language As A Cognitive Process, Volume 1, Syntax Addison-Wesley, 1982
Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design
(with Fernando Flores) Ablex Publ Corp, 1986
Usability: Turning Technologies into Tools (with Paul S. Adler) Oxford
University Press, 1992
Bringing Design to Software ACM Press, 1996
See also
David Kelley (IDEO)
Marvin Minsky
Seymour Papert
Gerry Sussman
Blocks world
Fernando Flores |
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