Peter Norvig is stepping back from Google after 20 years

Peter Norvig the director of research and former director of search quality at Google is joining Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute as a Distinguished Education Fellow. Peter Norvig joined Google in May 2021, after a prestigious career at NASA and Sun Microsystems.

He said he is still affiliated with Google but will be spending most of his time at Stanford going forward.

The announcement. The announcement said “artificial intelligence expert Peter Norvig is joining the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI this fall as a Distinguished Education Fellow, with the task of developing tools and materials to explain the key concepts of artificial intelligence. Norvig helped launch and build AI at organizations considered innovators in the field: As Google’s director of research, he oversaw the tech giant’s search algorithms and built the teams that focused on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. At NASA Ames, his team created autonomous software that was the first to command a spacecraft, and served as a precursor to the current Mars rovers.”

On a more fun note, Peter

Norvig is well known for his bright and unique shirts – there is even a webpage named shirts of Peter Norvig. Peter Norvig has spoken at our Search Marketing Expo conference in the past, back in 2010 at SMX he said that even back then PageRank was overhyped in his keynote talk at SMX West in Santa Clara.

He has a history with Stanford, he was a research student back in 1991 and then spent two years as a visiting lecturer between 2010 and 2012 at the University.

He is known for works named Known for Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp and was awarded an AAAI Fellow award in 2001.

Why we care. Peter Norvig is the latest big name at Google to step back from his day-to-day role at Google. He has set a lot of the groundwork for the mega search company and it looks like he is ready for his next thing now.

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