AI MATTERS, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4 SUMMER 2016

S AI Profiles: An interview with Peter NorvigAmy McGovern (University of Oklahoma; amcgovern@ou.edu)Eric Eaton (University of Pennsylvania; eeaton@cis.upenn.edu)DOI: 10.1145/3008665.3008667

Abstract

This column is the first in a new series profilingsenior AI researchers. This month focuses onPeter Norvig.

Introduction

With this issue, AI Matters is introducing a newcolumn profiling senior researchers in AI. Webegin with Peter Norvig, who is the Directorof Research at Google, Inc. We interviewedhim virtually. The interview has been editedfor clarity and length. We thank Peter for histime!

Peter Norvig

Bio

Peter Norvig is a Director of Research atGoogle Inc. Previously he was head ofGoogle’s core search algorithms group, andof NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Di-vision, making him NASA’s senior computer

Copyright c© 2016 by the author(s).

scientist. He received the NASA ExceptionalAchievement Award in 2001. He has taughtat the University of Southern California andthe University of California at Berkeley, fromwhich he received a Ph.D. in 1986 and the dis-tinguished alumni award in 2006. He was co-teacher of an Artificial Intelligence class thatsigned up 160,000 students, helping to kickoff the current round of massive open onlineclasses. His publications include the booksArtificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (theleading textbook in the field), Paradigms of AIProgramming: Case Studies in Common Lisp,Verbmobil: A Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog, and Intelligent Help Systems forUNIX. He is also the author of The Gettys-burg Powerpoint Presentation and the world’slongest palindromic sentence. He is a fellowof the AAAI, ACM, the California Academy ofScience, and the American Academy of Arts& Sciences.

Getting to know Peter Norvig

How did you become interested in AI?

I was lucky enough to go to a High School thathad access to a computer and a programmingclass, which was a rarity in 1974, and a Lin-guistics class; this got me interested in creat-ing models of language. Forty-two years later,I still haven’t figured it out, but I’ve had fun try-ing.

What was your most difficult professionaldecision and why?

In 1998, I was offered the position of lead-ing the Computational Sciences Division atNASA’s Ames Research Center. This wouldmean changing my role to be a manager of a200-person team, rather than contributing asan individual researcher/programmer. In thepast I remember there had been many timeswhen I had thought to myself “I could ask aco-worker to program this task, but it wouldbe easier to just do it myself.” But at NASA,

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and later at Google, the quality of the peoplewas so high, that it was worth it to forego the“do it yourself” approach, and concentrate ongetting everyone working together well. Thisrequired a different skill set, but in the endgreatly amplified the overall impact, and there-fore was worth it.

What professional achievement are youmost proud of?

First, as a mostly personal effort, Stuart Rus-sell and I (with help from others) were able toput together the textbook that has been theprimary resource in AI for 20 years. It wasgratifying to see our vision of the field em-braced and to hear from so many studentswho enjoyed using it. Later I was able to teamwith Sebastian Thrun to bring the core ideasto a large group of online students.

Second, as a team effort, I was the managerfor the core Google search team during a pe-riod of great growth from 2002 to 2006. I wasproud that we were able to help billions of peo-ple with trillions of questions, through the com-bined brilliance of so many great team mem-bers.

What do you wish you had known as aPh.D. student or early researcher?

When I finished grad school, there was an ex-pectation that the “right” path was to stay inacademia. In my second year of grad school,two of my most respected fellow students, BillJoy and Eric Schmidt, left to start a com-pany selling workstations. I remember think-ing “Why would they do that? They could havebeen assistant professors at good schools!” Ittook me a while to realize that there are mul-tiple paths: in academia, industry research,startups, government, and non-profits, andany one of them, or any combination of them,could be the right choice for you.

What would you want for your career ifyou couldn’t do AI?

If I couldn’t do AI, I suppose I would want to doAI all the more. But I probably would end upin a field that looks at the same problems froma different point of view, such as Linguistics orStatistics.

What is a typical day like for you?

I answered a similar question on Quora, andit still holds true. At Google there’s alwayssomething new to work on; I can’t really fallinto a set routine. Within a project there arealways changes of strategy as we learn moreand the world changes. And from one yearto the next my role has changed. I’ve var-ied from having two to two hundred people re-porting to me, which means that sometimes Ihave very clear technical insight for every oneof the projects I’m involved with, and some-times I have a higher-level view, and I have totrust my teams to do the right thing. In thosecases, my role is more one of communicationand matchmaker: to try to explain which direc-tion the company is going in and how a partic-ular project fits in, and to introduce the projectteam to the right collaborators, producers, andconsumers, but to let the team work out thedetails of how to reach their goals. I don’t writecode that ends up on Google, but if I have anidea, I can write code to experiment with theinternal tools to see if the idea is worth lookingat more carefully. And I do code reviews, bothso that I can see more of the code that theteams are producing, and because somebodyhas to do it.

There is always a backlog of meetings, emails,and documents to get through. Google is lessbureaucratic than anyplace else I’ve worked,but some of this is inevitable. I also spendsome time going to conferences, talking withUniversities and customers, and answeringquestions like these.

What is your favorite AI-related joke?

I don’t have a good AI joke, but I did invent myown math joke:

“I saw a pair of mathematicians get into a ter-rible argument about a Mobius strip. It wasone-sided.”

What is your favorite AI-related movie andwhy?

I liked the movie Her, because the technol-ogy is both central to the plot, but mostly re-ceded into the background of the society thatis portrayed. When asked what movie Her re-minded me of most, I said Monty Python’s Life

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of Brian, because both movies are about thehuman capacity for faith – wanting to believein something.

How do you spend your free time?

My hobbies are photography and bicycling.Photography is a good art form for me be-cause it doesn’t require that much hand-eyecoordination. It is all about simplification andsubtraction rather than addition and it allowsme to think about gadgets and technical equa-tions (as in Marc Levoy’s Lectures on Dig-ital Photography). Bicycling is right for mebecause it is just the right speed to see thescenery: with walking you don’t get far enoughto see much, and in touring by car you go toofast to see much.

What is a skill you would like to learn andwhy?

I’ve tried a couple of times to play music, butso far I’m better as an avid listener.

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