Peter Norvig is a computer scientist best known as co-author, with Stuart Russell, of “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” the most widely used AI textbook in the world. On his own site he notes the book has been the leading text in the field since 1995 across four editions, with over 500,000 copies sold. For generations of students, “Russell and Norvig” is the book that defined how AI is taught.
Norvig’s career spans government and industry research. He led NASA Ames’s Computational Sciences Division, where his team built the Remote Agent that flew on the Deep Space 1 spacecraft, the first use of autonomous planning and fault-handling onboard a spacecraft. At Google he served as Director of Search and then Director of Research starting in 2005, overseeing the rise of leading teams in machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. He holds a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley.
He has also been a notable advocate for open AI education, co-teaching a free online AI course that enrolled roughly 160,000 students and helping launch Google’s tools for building online courses. For a general reader, Norvig matters because so much of how the field is learned, taught, and explained traces back through his textbook and his teaching as much as through any single research result.