Peter Norvig
Director, Research, Google

Peter Norvig is a director of research at Google. In his prior role, as director of search quality, he directed Google’s core Search Algorithms Group, which means he was the manager of record responsible for answering more queries than anyone else in the history of the world. Previously, he was the head of the Computational Sciences Division at the NASA Ames Research Center (NASA’s senior computer scientist) and received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Award in 2001. He was also an assistant professor at the University of Southern California and a research faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He has over 50 publications in computer science, concentrating on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and software engineering. He is the author of Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp, Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems for UNIX and coauthor of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the leading textbook in the field. He is also the author of the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and has written the world’s longest palindromic sentence. Peter is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, where he was recognized with a distinguished alumni award in 2006.