Patrick Henry Winston

Researcher in machine learning and human intelligence, Winston was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served as Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab, and was succeeded by Rodney Brooks. Brooks assisted with merging the lab with the MIT Lab for Computer Science to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

In the 1960s, his thesis work with Marvin Minsky concerned the difficulty of learning, concluding that it was only possible to learn something one nearly already knows. Winston remained active in research and explored his interest in machine learning and human intelligence. He was known within the MIT community for his strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture.

Classes he taught and helped to develop included 6.034 — Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833 — Human Intelligence Enterprise. Along with co-developers, Winston received the 2011 Eta Kappa Nu Teaching Award for excellence in instruction, a MacVicar Faculty Fellowship in 2011, the Baker Award for undergraduate teaching in 2010, and the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award in 2006.

He was also the author of a number of CS and AI textbooks, including: Artificial Intelligence ISBN 0201533774; The Psychology of Computer Vision ISBN 0070710481; Lisp (with Berthold K. P. Horn) ISBN 0201083191; On to C ISBN 020158042X; On to C++ ISBN 0201580438; On to Java (with Sundar Narasimhan) ISBN 0201725932; and On to Smalltalk ISBN 0201498278.