MIT Professor, A.I. Pioneer Dies at 88

Marvin Minsky, a founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Artificial Intelligence Project, has died. He was 88. Minsky died Sunday of a cerebral hemorrhage, The New York Times reported. He was one of the first researchers to work on artificial neural networks, which would become a key technology in the field of deep learning. In 1959, Minsky and John McCarthy, who coined the term artificial intelligence, founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Project, which later became known as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In 1963, he invented the first head-mounted graphical display, which would later help to inform the Oculus Rift headset. In 1970, Minsky received the Turing Award from Association for Computing Machinery and in 1973 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.