Edward Feigenbaum

Edward Albert Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist widely regarded as the father of expert systems, who earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, then the Carnegie Institute of Technology, under Herbert Simon before joining Stanford University in 1965 as one of the founders of its computer science department. At Stanford, Feigenbaum led the DENDRAL project, one of the first artificial intelligence programs designed to capture and apply the specialized reasoning of human experts, in this case for identifying chemical compounds from mass spectrometry data, and his work established that expert systems could deliver genuine practical and commercial value. He co-founded the companies IntelliCorp and Teknowledge to commercialize knowledge-based systems and built the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford. Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award jointly with Raj Reddy in 1994 for pioneering the design and construction of large-scale artificial intelligence systems, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986.