Marvin Minsky

MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab
Professor Emeritus, Media Arts and Sciences
Professor of E.E. and C.S., M.I.T
minsky at media.mit.edu


Abstracts   Bibliography   Biography   Books, Students & Mentors   FTP

Marvin Minsky has made many contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in The Society of Mind (CDROM, book) which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT.

He received the BA and PhD in mathematics at Harvard and Princeton. In 1951 he built the SNARC, the first neural network simulator. His other inventions include mechanical hands and other robotic devices,the confocal scanning microscope, the "Muse" synthesizer for musical variations (with E. Fredkin), and the first LOGO "turtle" (with S. Papert). A member of the NAS, NAE and Argentine NAS, he has received the ACM Turing Award, the MIT Killian Award, the Japan Prize, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the Rank Prize and the Robert Wood Prize for Optoelectronics, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal.

Some Publications

Alien Intelligence (html)
Causal Diversity (txt, html)
Why People Think Computers Can't (text)
Music Interview with Otto Laske (text)
Matter, Mind and Models (text, html)
Music, Mind, and Meaning (html)
Symbolic vs. Connectionist (html)
Alienable Rights (html)
Framework for Representing Knowledge (html)
Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence (html)
1971 AI Progress Report (html)

Afterword to True Names(html)
1970 ACM Turing Lecture (html)
Inventing the Confocal Microscope (text) (html)
Negative Expertise (text)
Jokes and Cognition (text)
Introduction to
LogoWorks (html)
More
Turing Option chapters (text)
Will Robots Inherit the Earth? (text, html)
The Society of Mind (CDROM, book)
BBC-3 Music Interview Sept. 5, 2004 (mp3 file)
Internal Grounding Sept.2005 ( html)
The Emotion Machine
(draft) ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 )

Research Groups

  MIT AI Lab

  Brain Opera

  MIT Media Lab

  Machine Understanding

  Learning & Common Sense

Family

Margaret Minsky
Gloria Rudisch Minsky
Oliver Steele

Julie Minsky
Henry Minsky

Milan Singh Minsky
Universal Access
Matthew Amster


Abstracts   Bibliography   Biography   Books and People   FTP