Each year, the Dan David Foundation, headquartered at Tel Aviv University, selects a laureate — for each of three time dimensions past, present and future — who represents the culmination of innovative and interdisciplinary research that fosters universal values and goals promoting outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social achievements that improve the world.
This year the Dan David Foundation International Board selected Marvin Minsky to receive the Dan David Foundation Prize for the Future Time Dimension titled “Artificial Intelligence: The Digital Mind. Prof. Minsky was selected as one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence. He is cited as among the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century in a variety of disciplines, including AI, robotics, computation, learning, cognition, philosophy and optics.
Marvin Minsky, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT has made his professional life at MIT since 1957, founding the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project in 1959, serving as Co-Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1959 to 1974, and serving as the Donner Professor of Science at MIT from 1974 to 1989. He became the Toshiba professor of Media Arts and Sciences in 1990.
Pioneering robotics and telepresence, Minsky is recognized for his work using computational ideas to characterize human psychological processes – and working to endow machines with intelligence. His early 1960s papers “Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence,” “Matter, Mind, and Models,” and (with Seymour Papert) “Perceptrons” placed Prof. Minsky in the forefront of the new field of Artificial Intelligence. With Papert, Minsky proposed a new theory they called “The Society of Mind” – combining developments from child psychology with their research on Artificial Intelligence to address the complexity of intelligence.
Minsky continued to develop this theory through the next decade, publishing in 1985 a book of the same title and proposing individual mechanisms to account for a matching psychological phenomenon. He proposed theories to account for human higher-level feelings and uniquely human resourcefulness in the sequel, “The Emotion Machine.”
Prof. Minsky has received numerous awards including the ACM Turing Award in 1970, the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award in 1995 and the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute in 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and many other societies. He completed his PhD dissertation at Princeton University in 1954. It was titled “neural nets and the Brain Model Problem.” This represented the first publication of theories and theorems about learning in neural networks, secondary reinforcement, circulating dynamic storage and synaptic modifications.
Read about the 2014 Dan David Prizes in the Jerusalem Post.
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