Push Singh

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Push Singh, Ph.D. was a postdoctoral artificial intelligence researcher at MIT who was slated to begin a professorship at the MIT Media Lab in 2006. He worked on commonsense reasoning and passed away in February of 2006. His death has been conjectured to have been a suicide. He was gifted in his ability in helping people collaborate together, and in his vision of alternative approaches to Artificial Intelligence.

From his web page at http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/, he said:

"My research is focused on finding ways to give computers human-like common sense, the ability to think about the everyday world like people do. I believe this will enable a new generation of computing systems that will be much more powerful and friendly than those based on present-day technologies.

I am actively pushing a project at the Media Lab to develop programs capable of commonsense thinking. This is a very hands-on effort to build a suite of commonsense knowledge bases, inference engines, and architectural elements for linking these together, as well as new kinds of applications built on these technologies. These systems use multiple representations including semantic networks, propositional and first-order probabilistic graphical models, case bases of story scripts, rule based systems, logical axioms, shape descriptions, and even English sentences. For more details about this effort please visit the Media Lab's Computing web page.

My long-term goal is to understand how minds work, so that I can construct a machine that thinks. No small task, but I do have the advantage of an amazing mentor, the redoubtable Marvin Minsky."