Peter Norvig

Notable work and positions

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI — Distinguished Education Fellow (2022– )
Google Inc. — Former Director of Research (2005–2022); Former Director of Search Quality (2002–2005)
NASA Ames Research Center — Former Head, Computational Sciences Division

Biography

Peter Norvig, born December 14, 1956, is a Distinguished Education Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, a position he took up in fall 2022 after 20 years at Google. At Google, he served as director of search quality from 2002 to 2005, responsible for the company's core web search algorithms during a period of twenty-fold growth, and as director of research from 2005, overseeing teams in machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. He previously headed the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, serving as NASA's senior computer scientist and receiving the agency's Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He holds a Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Norvig is co-author with Stuart J. Russell of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries, and in 2011 co-taught with Sebastian Thrun an online artificial intelligence course that enrolled more than 160,000 students, helping launch the massive open online course movement. He is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, California Academy of Science, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.