Peter Norvig joins Stanford whereas downscaling from Google

Peter Norvig, a 20-year-old Google veterinarian, Google R&D director, and former Director of Search Quality at Google, is retiring from Google to join the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute as a Distinguished Education Fellow.

I wrote about this message the other day Search engine country and stated there that he is still connected to Google but will spend most of his time in Stanford in the future.

The announcement came from Stanford that wrote:

Artificial intelligence expert Peter Norvig is joining the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI as a Distinguished Education Fellow this fall to develop tools and materials to explain key concepts in artificial intelligence.

Norvig helped introduce and develop AI in companies considered innovators in the field: as Google’s research director, he oversaw the tech giant’s search algorithms and built the teams focused on machine translation, speech recognition and computer vision. At NASA Ames, his team developed autonomous software that was the first to command a spacecraft and which served as the forerunner of the current Mars rovers.

Norvig is also a household name in AI education. He co-authored Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, an introductory textbook used by around 1,500 universities worldwide, and has taught hundreds of thousands of students through his courses on the online education platform Udacity.

There’s a whole interview with him that you can watch there.

Peter Norvig has been with Google for a long time – I think he wants to do something new at this stage in his life. It’s interesting that he’s not giving up his affiliation with Google.

Forum discussion at Twitter.