Patrick Winston Explained

Patrick Henry Winston
Birth Date:	5 February 1943
Birth Place:	Peoria, Illinois, U.S.
Death Place:	Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality:	American
Fields:	Artificial Intelligence Computer Science
Alma Mater:	MIT (BS 1965, MS 1967, PhD 1970) ^[1]
Thesis Title:	Learning Structural Descriptions from Examples
Thesis Url:	http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6884
Thesis Year:	1970
Doctoral Advisor:	Marvin Minsky
Doctoral Students:	David Waltz Philip Greenspun
Awards:	IJCAI Computers and Thought Award
Spouse:	Karen Prendergast^[2]
Children:	1

Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab. Winston was succeeded as director by Rodney Brooks.

After graduating from high school, Winston left East Peoria, a suburb of Peoria, IL, to come to MIT by train. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1965, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and went on to complete his Masters and PhD there as well, finalizing his PhD in 1970. His research interests included machine learning and human intelligence. Winston was known within the MIT community for his excellent teaching and strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture.^[3]

At MIT, Winston taught 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston's How to Speak talk was an MIT tradition for over 40 years. "Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules."^[4] A book with his insights and teachings on communication was published in 2020 by the MIT Press: "Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform".^[5]

Winston served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence from 1985–1987.

Winston died in Boston on July 19, 2019.^[6]

Bibliography and publications

Winston authored a number of computer science and AI textbooks, including:

Artificial Intelligence
The Psychology of Computer Vision
Lisp (with Berthold K.P. Horn)
On to C
On to C++
On to Java (with Sundar Narasimhan)
On to Smalltalk

External links

Personal homepage
Web site: Winston . Patrick . [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY How to Speak ]. https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211221/Unzc731iCUY . 2021-12-21 . live. MIT OpenCourseWare . . 11 August 2020 . en.
Oral History with Patrick H. Winston, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Notes and References

http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/vitae.html CV of Winston
Web site: Professor Patrick Winston, former director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, dies at 76. 19 July 2019 . MIT news. 20 June 2020.
Web site: Schaffer. Amanda. Knight. Will. Patrick Winston '65, SM '67, PhD '70. August 21, 2019. Jan 14, 2022. MIT Technology Review.
Web site: Winston. Patrick. How to Speak. MIT OpenCourseWare. en. Aug 11, 2020.
Book: Patrick, Winston. Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform. The MIT Press. 2020. 9780262360395. en.
Professor Patrick Winston, former director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, dies at 76 . Conner-Simons, Adam . Gordon, Rachel . MIT . July 19, 2019.