Terry Winograd

American computer scientist, professor emeritus at Stanford University. His MIT doctoral program SHRDLUSHRDLU, prop. n.: A program from around 1970 that let people move toy blocks in a simulated world by typing ordinary English commands and questions, and that could explain what it had done and why. (1968–70) conversed in English about a simulated world of blocks, parsing commands, answering questions and carrying out actions, and was the most celebrated natural-language system of its day ('Understanding Natural Language', 1972). An example sentence from that work, in which deciding what 'they' refers to requires knowledge of the world, inspired the Winograd schema challengeWinograd schema challenge, prop. n.: A test of machine common sense built from pairs of sentences in which changing one word changes what a pronoun refers to — something people resolve instantly using everyday knowledge. (2011), a test of commonsense reasoningcommonsense reasoning, n.: The everyday background knowledge and reasoning people take for granted — dropped glasses break, hungry people eat, nobody is in two places at once — which machines long struggled to match.. At Stanford from 1973 he became a critic of symbolic AIsymbolic AI, n.: An approach to AI that writes knowledge down as human-readable symbols and rules, such as 'every bird has wings', and reasons by manipulating them step by step instead of learning patterns from data.: 'Understanding Computers and Cognition' (1986, with Fernando Flores) drew on Heidegger to argue that computers cannot understand language as people do, and he redirected his work toward human–computer interaction and design. He was a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and advised the doctoral work of Larry Page, with whom he co-authored the 1999 report describing PageRank.