Dean Christakos« Time for a Tune-Up | Main | Stuff You Can't Make Up »
March 2, 2006
Someone you probably didn't know, but should have
A promising and successful researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Pushpinder Singh, passed away on Tuesday. We lived in the same dorm as undergraduates at MIT and both worked at the MIT Media Laboratory in graduate school, but that in no way implies that I was anywhere in his intellectual or professional league. His mentor was AI giant Marvin Minsky, whose research niche Push was poised to take over as Minsky retired.
To say that Push was brilliant was to understate the situation. I think it was a testimony to his intelligence that he could accept the challenge of developing machines that think like people-- a task that many other students of Computer Science, such as myself, considered too intractable to even bother with. Push, on the other hand, was willing to write the AI application that required 1 million lines of code in order to create systems with rudimentary, but functional reasoning skills and create the massive cooperative project to build a "common sense database" in the hopes that computers would be able to make the inferences that the rest of us don't even give a second thought to.
I don't know what happens to personal websites when the owner dies, but the Internet Archive will no doubt preserve Push's page.
I don't know what else to say. In college, you assume that everyone you know there will be around forever. Particularly for those of us who stayed in (or returned to) the Boston area after graduating, the idea that the cohort of those who were always around would, at some point, no longer be around was difficult to envision-- Push was slated to join the MIT faculty in 2007, ensuring his place as a permanent fixture of the community.
Posted by Dean at March 2, 2006 11:29 AM