Patrick Henry Winston
Born	(1943-02-05)February 5, 1943 Peoria, Illinois, U.S.
Died	July 19, 2019(2019-07-19) (aged 76) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	MIT (BS 1965, MS 1967, PhD 1970) [1]
Spouse	Karen Prendergast [2]
Children	1
Awards	IJCAI Computers and Thought Award
Scientific career
Fields	Artificial Intelligence Computer Science
Thesis	Learning Structural Descriptions from Examples (1970)
Doctoral advisor	Marvin Minsky
Doctoral students	David Waltz Philip Greenspun
Website	Personal homepage

Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab. Winston was succeeded as director by Rodney Brooks.

After graduating from high school, Winston left East Peoria, a suburb of Peoria, IL, to come to MIT by train. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1965, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and went on to complete his Masters and PhD there as well, finalizing his PhD in 1970. His research interests included machine learning and human intelligence. Winston was known within the MIT community for his excellent teaching and strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture. ^[3]

At MIT, Winston taught 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston's How to Speak talk was an MIT tradition for over 40 years. "Offered every January, the talk is intended to improve your speaking ability in critical situations by teaching you a few heuristic rules." ^[4] A book with his insights and teachings on communication was published in 2020 by the MIT Press: "Make It Clear: Speak and Write to Persuade and Inform". ^[5]

Winston served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence from 1985–1987.

Winston died in Boston on July 19, 2019. ^[6]

Bibliography and publications

Winston authored a number of computer science and AI textbooks, including:

• Artificial Intelligence ISBN  0201533774
• The Psychology of Computer Vision ISBN  0070710481
• Lisp (with Berthold K.P. Horn) ISBN  0201083191
• On to C ISBN  020158042X
• On to C++ ISBN  0201580438
• On to Java (with Sundar Narasimhan) ISBN  0201725932
• On to Smalltalk ISBN  0201498278

References

External links

• Personal homepage
• Winston, Patrick. "How to Speak". MIT OpenCourseWare. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 11 August 2020 – via YouTube.
• Oral History with Patrick H. Winston, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

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