Terry Winograd is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His own homepage describes his early career as “pioneering research in artificial intelligence, in particular natural language understanding,” carried out during his PhD at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late 1960s.
That PhD work produced SHRDLU, a program that carried on a typed English conversation about a simulated world of colored blocks, parsing commands, answering questions, and reasoning about what it could and could not do. Winograd’s 1972 book “Understanding Natural Language” laid out the system in detail, and for years it stood as one of the most impressive demonstrations of machine language comprehension. He later wrote “Language as a Cognitive Process: Syntax” (1983).
Winograd’s thinking then shifted. His 1987 book with the Chilean philosopher Fernando Flores marked, in his words, a major departure from the assumptions underlying symbolic AI, arguing that intelligence is grounded in situated human activity rather than formal manipulation of representations. He moved his research toward human-computer interaction, founding Stanford’s HCI Group and co-founding the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the “d.school”).
He also became an influential teacher. His homepage notes that he consulted for companies “including Google, founded by Stanford students from his projects” - a reference to Larry Page, who was his doctoral advisee. His name lives on in NLP through the Winograd Schema Challenge, a commonsense-reasoning test named for the ambiguous pronoun sentences he studied.