Oliver Selfridge

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Oliver Gordon Selfridge, grandson of the founder of Selfridges' department stores, has been called the "Father of Machine Perception." He wrote important early papers on neural networks and pattern recognition and machine learning, and his "Pandemonium" paper (1959) is generally recognized as a classic in artificial intelligence. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to Aspect-oriented programming.

Selfridge was born in England, educated at Malvern College and then earned an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945 [1]. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at MIT, but did not earn his PhD after failing his doctoral examination. While at MIT, he acted as one of the earlier reviewers for Wiener's "Cybernetics" book in 1949. He was also technically a supervisor of Marvin Minsky, and helped organize the first ever public meeting on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Minsky in 1955.

In 1968, in their formative paper "The Computer as a Communication Device", J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor introduced a concept known as an OLIVER (Online Interactive Expediter and Responder) which was named in honor of Selfridge.

Selfridge spent his career at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT (where he was Associate Director of Project MAC), BBN, and GTE Laboratories where he became Chief Scientist. He served on the NSA Advisory Board for 20 years, chairing the Data Processing Panel. Selfridge retired in 1993, but remains active in Machine Learning, AI, and self-improving systems.