Edward A. Feigenbaum

Timeline

1. 1956–1965

   Education and university research

   Feigenbaum earned an electrical engineering degree at Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1956 and a doctorate in industrial administration in 1960. He held Berkeley appointments from 1960 to 1965 and Stanford appointments beginning in 1965. He also coedited Computers and Thought with Julian Feldman in 1963.

2. 1972–1976

   Learning rules for scientific inference

   He coauthored papers with Bruce Buchanan and others on data interpretation and heuristic theory formation. A 1976 paper studied automatic rule formation in mass spectrometry through Meta-DENDRAL.

3. 1978–1992

   A computing resource for medical AI

   Feigenbaum served as a co-principal investigator and later principal investigator of SUMEX-AIM. SUMEX-AIM was a national computer resource for applications of AI to medicine and biology. His Stanford department chair period, 1976 to 1981, partly overlapped this responsibility.

4. 1980–1993

   DENDRAL publications

   Feigenbaum, Robert Lindsay, Buchanan and Joshua Lederberg coauthored a 1980 book on AI for organic chemistry through DENDRAL. The group published a 1993 case study. Feigenbaum and Buchanan also wrote a 1993 account of DENDRAL and Meta-DENDRAL as roots of knowledge systems.