Ruth Stalker-Firth

In 1996, I listened to Lofty Zadeh, the daddy of fuzzy logic, give his keynote speech at the ‘Artificial Intelligence in Design’ conference, Stanford University. He described the excitment of artificial intelligence in the 1950s and how Marvin Minsky, father of frames, told a press conference that 50 years on, computers would read and understand Shakespeare. When Zadeh asked Minsky what possessed him make such a claim, Minsky said that he didn’t know, he had just gotten carried away.

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I created my first webpage in 1995, which has since disappeared forever as even www.archive.org thinks it’s too old to store. Fingers poised over my keyboard, I felt shy about what to write. Eventually, I restricted myself to my research interests as I didn’t think that anyone would care to know about my favourite beer. How times have changed. The web nowadays is full of people talking about their favourite beers (mine, by the way, are Theakston’s Old Peculiar and Franziskaner). Everyone likes to chat. (more…)