Peter Norvig Joining Stanford As He Scales Back From Google

Peter Norvig, a 20-year Google vet, Google R&D director and former director of search quality at Google, is scaling back from his Google work to join Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute as a Distinguished Education Fellow.

I wrote about this news the other day on Search Engine Land and explained there that he is still affiliated with Google but will be spending most of his time at Stanford going forward.

The announcement came from Stanford that wrote:

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.

Norvig is also a well-known name in AI education. He co-wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, an introductory textbook used by some 1,500 universities worldwide, and he’s taught hundreds of thousands of students through his courses on online education platform Udacity.

There is a whole interview with him that you can check out there.

Peter Norvig has been with Google for a long long time – I guess he wants to do something new at this stage in his life. It is interesting he is not dropping his affiliation with Google.

Forum discussion at Twitter.