Peter Norvig

Bio: Peter Norvig is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Knowledge representation and reasoning & Natural language. The author has an hindex of 27, co-authored 79 publications receiving 24254 citations. Previous affiliations of Peter Norvig include University of California & University of Southern California.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Abstract: The long-anticipated revision of this #1 selling book offers the most comprehensive, state of the art introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence for modern applications. Intelligent Agents. Solving Problems by Searching. Informed Search Methods. Game Playing. Agents that Reason Logically. First-order Logic. Building a Knowledge Base. Inference in First-Order Logic. Logical Reasoning Systems. Practical Planning. Planning and Acting. Uncertainty. Probabilistic Reasoning Systems. Making Simple Decisions. Making Complex Decisions. Learning from Observations. Learning with Neural Networks. Reinforcement Learning. Knowledge in Learning. Agents that Communicate. Practical Communication in English. Perception. Robotics. For computer professionals, linguists, and cognitive scientists interested in artificial intelligence.

Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books

Abstract: We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics,' focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

Abstract: Humankind has given itself the scientific name homo sapiens--man the wise--because our mental capacities are so important to our everyday lives and our sense of self. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, attempts to understand intelligent entities. Thus, one reason to study it is to learn more about ourselves. But unlike philosophy and psychology, which are also concerned with AI strives to build intelligent entities as well as understand them. Another reason to study AI is that these constructed intelligent entities are interesting and useful in their own right. AI has produced many significant and impressive products even at this early stage in its development. Although no one can predict the future in detail, it is clear that computers with human-level intelligence (or better) would have a huge impact on our everyday lives and on the future course of civilization. AI addresses one of the ultimate puzzles. How is it possible for a slow, tiny brain{brain}, whether biological or electronic, to perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself? How do we go about making something with those properties? These are hard questions, but unlike the search for faster-than-light travel or an antigravity device, the researcher in AI has solid evidence that the quest is possible. All the researcher has to do is look in the mirror to see an example of an intelligent system. AI is one of the newest disciplines. It was formally initiated in 1956, when the name was coined, although at that point work had been under way for about five years. Along with modern genetics, it is regularly cited as the ``field I would most like to be in'' by scientists in other disciplines. A student in physics might reasonably feel that all the good ideas have already been taken by Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the rest, and that it takes many years of study before one can contribute new ideas. AI, on the other hand, still has openings for a full-time Einstein. The study of intelligence is also one of the oldest disciplines. For over 2000 years, philosophers have tried to understand how seeing, learning, remembering, and reasoning could, or should, be done. The advent of usable computers in the early 1950s turned the learned but armchair speculation concerning these mental faculties into a real experimental and theoretical discipline. Many felt that the new ``Electronic Super-Brains'' had unlimited potential for intelligence. ``Faster Than Einstein'' was a typical headline. But as well as providing a vehicle for creating artificially intelligent entities, the computer provides a tool for testing theories of intelligence, and many theories failed to withstand the test--a case of ``out of the armchair, into the fire.'' AI has turned out to be more difficult than many at first imagined, and modern ideas are much richer, more subtle, and more interesting as a result. AI currently encompasses a huge variety of subfields, from general-purpose areas such as perception and logical reasoning, to specific tasks such as playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, writing poetry{poetry}, and diagnosing diseases. Often, scientists in other fields move gradually into artificial intelligence, where they find the tools and vocabulary to systematize and automate the intellectual tasks on which they have been working all their lives. Similarly, workers in AI can choose to apply their methods to any area of human intellectual endeavor. In this sense, it is truly a universal field.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

Abstract: At Brown University, there is excitement of having access to the Brown Corpus, containing one million English words. Since then, we have seen several notable corpora that are about 100 times larger, and in 2006, Google released a trillion-word corpus with frequency counts for all sequences up to five words long. In some ways this corpus is a step backwards from the Brown Corpus: it's taken from unfiltered Web pages and thus contains incomplete sentences, spelling errors, grammatical errors, and all sorts of other errors. It's not annotated with carefully hand-corrected part-of-speech tags. But the fact that it's a million times larger than the Brown Corpus outweighs these drawbacks. A trillion-word corpus - along with other Web-derived corpora of millions, billions, or trillions of links, videos, images, tables, and user interactions - captures even very rare aspects of human behavior. So, this corpus could serve as the basis of a complete model for certain tasks - if only we knew how to extract the model from the data.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp

Abstract: From the Publisher: Paradigms of AI Programming is the first text to teach advanced Common Lisp techniques in the context of building major AI systems By reconstructing authentic, complex AI programs using state-of-the-art Common Lisp, the book teaches students and professionals how to build and debug robust practical programs, while demonstrating superior programming style and important AI concepts The author strongly emphasizes the practical performance issues involved in writing real working programs of significant size Chapters on troubleshooting and efficiency are included, along with a discussion of the fundamentals of object-oriented programming and a description of the main CLOS functions This volume is an excellent text for a course on AI programming, a useful supplement for general AI courses and an indispensable reference for the professional programmer

Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

Abstract: Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques offers a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying machine learning tools and techniques in real-world data mining situations. This highly anticipated third edition of the most acclaimed work on data mining and machine learning will teach you everything you need to know about preparing inputs, interpreting outputs, evaluating results, and the algorithmic methods at the heart of successful data mining. Thorough updates reflect the technical changes and modernizations that have taken place in the field since the last edition, including new material on Data Transformations, Ensemble Learning, Massive Data Sets, Multi-instance Learning, plus a new version of the popular Weka machine learning software developed by the authors. Witten, Frank, and Hall include both tried-and-true techniques of today as well as methods at the leading edge of contemporary research. *Provides a thorough grounding in machine learning concepts as well as practical advice on applying the tools and techniques to your data mining projects *Offers concrete tips and techniques for performance improvement that work by transforming the input or output in machine learning methods *Includes downloadable Weka software toolkit, a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks-in an updated, interactive interface. Algorithms in toolkit cover: data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, visualization

Distributed Optimization and Statistical Learning Via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

Abstract: Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for l1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations.

WordNet : an electronic lexical database

Abstract: Part 1 The lexical database: nouns in WordNet, George A. Miller modifiers in WordNet, Katherine J. Miller a semantic network of English verbs, Christiane Fellbaum design and implementation of the WordNet lexical database and searching software, Randee I. Tengi. Part 2: automated discovery of WordNet relations, Marti A. Hearst representing verb alterations in WordNet, Karen T. Kohl et al the formalization of WordNet by methods of relational concept analysis, Uta E. Priss. Part 3 Applications of WordNet: building semantic concordances, Shari Landes et al performance and confidence in a semantic annotation task, Christiane Fellbaum et al WordNet and class-based probabilities, Philip Resnik combining local context and WordNet similarity for word sense identification, Claudia Leacock and Martin Chodorow using WordNet for text retrieval, Ellen M. Voorhees lexical chains as representations of context for the detection and correction of malapropisms, Graeme Hirst and David St-Onge temporal indexing through lexical chaining, Reem Al-Halimi and Rick Kazman COLOR-X - using knowledge from WordNet for conceptual modelling, J.F.M. Burg and R.P. van de Riet knowledge processing on an extended WordNet, Sanda M. Harabagiu and Dan I Moldovan appendix - obtaining and using WordNet.