Peter Norvig is a prominent computer scientist and a leading figure in the field of artificial intelligence. He is best known for his long tenure as Director of Research at Google, a position he held from 2002 until 2011, and for his influential textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-authored with Stuart Russell. This book is widely considered the standard text in the field and has educated generations of AI researchers and practitioners.
Norvig's career has been marked by a blend of academic rigor and practical application. Before his time at Google, he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at NASA Ames Research Center, where he led a team of scientists and engineers. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Southern California and served as a research faculty member at Berkeley. His work spans a wide range of topics, including natural language processing, information retrieval, and software engineering, and he is a strong advocate for a data-driven, probabilistic approach to AI.