Edward Feigenbaum


Edward Albert Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist working in the field of artificial intelligence, and with Raj Reddy he won the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He is often called the "father of expert systems".

Education and early life

Feigenbaum was born in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1936 to a culturally Jewish family, and moved to nearby North Bergen, where he lived until the age of 16, when he left to start college. His hometown did not have a secondary school of its own, and so he chose Weehawken High School for its college preparatory program. He was inducted into his high school's hall of fame in 1996.
Feigenbaum completed his undergraduate degree, and a Ph.D., at Carnegie Institute of Technology. In his PhD thesis, carried out under the supervision of Herbert A. Simon, he developed EPAM, one of the first computer models of how people learn.
During undergrad years, he took a graduate-level course called "Ideas and Social Change" taught by James March. March introduced him to Herbert Simon. Feigenbaum took a course "Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences" taught by Simon, where Simon announced the Logic Theorist with "Over the Christmas holidays, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine." Simon gave Feigenbaum a manual of IBM 701, which he read in one night. Feigenbaum later called it a "born-again experience".

Career and research

Feigenbaum completed a Fulbright fellowship at the National Physical Laboratory and in 1960 went to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach in the School of Business Administration. He joined the Stanford University faculty in 1965 as one of the founders of its computer science department. He was the director of the Stanford Computation Center from 1965 to 1968. He established the Knowledge Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. Important projects that Feigenbaum was involved in include systems in medicine, as ACME, MYCIN, SUMEX, and Dendral. He also co-founded companies IntelliCorp and Teknowledge.
File:AAAI 2025 - Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy 01.jpg|thumb|left|Feigenbaum and Raj Reddy honored at AAAI 2026
Teknowledge was founded in July 1981 by 20 computer scientists from Stanford University, MIT, and the Rand Corporation. The company's staff "represent about 1/3 of the world's high-level expertise in the design and development of knowledge systems". Its aim was to allow people without training in knowledge-engineering technology to use it for commercial and industrial applications.
In 2000, Feigenbaum became a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His former doctoral students include Peter Karp, Niklaus Wirth, and Alon Halevy.
In January 2026, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence honored Feigenbaum at its 40th annual conference in Singapore in celebration of his 90th birthday, recognizing his foundational contributions to the field of expert systems.

Honors and awards

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