Eric Horvitz

Quality 0.50 · 2 views · Updated 2 months ago

American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft

title: "Eric Horvitz" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["living-people", "american-computer-scientists", "people-in-information-technology", "microsoft-employees", "fellows-of-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciences", "fellows-of-the-association-for-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligence", "presidents-of-the-association-for-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligence", "members-of-the-american-philosophical-society", "year-of-birth-missing-(living-people)", "microsoft-technical-fellows"] description: "American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft" topic_path: "technology/computing" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Horvitz" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox person"]

FieldValue
nameEric Horvitz
imageEric Horvitz, PCAST Member (cropped).jpg
birth_nameEric Joel Horvitz
nationalityAmerican
employerMicrosoft
educationPh.D and M.D. from Stanford University
occupationComputer scientist
titleChief Scientific Officer
::

| name = Eric Horvitz | image = Eric Horvitz, PCAST Member (cropped).jpg | birth_name = Eric Joel Horvitz | birth_date = | birth_place = | death_date = | death_place = | death_cause = | nationality = American | citizenship = | other_names = | employer = Microsoft | education = Ph.D and M.D. from Stanford University | networth = | occupation = Computer scientist | title = Chief Scientific Officer | spouse = | children = | parents = | relations = | website = Eric Joel Horvitz () is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer. He was previously the director of Microsoft Research Labs, including research centers in Redmond, WA, Cambridge, MA, New York, NY, Montreal, Canada, Cambridge, UK, and Bangalore, India.

Horvitz was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for computational mechanisms for decision making under uncertainty and with bounded resources.

Biography

Horvitz received his Ph.D and M.D. from Stanford University. His doctoral dissertation, Computation and Action Under Bounded Resources, and follow-on research introduced models of bounded rationality founded in probability and decision theory. He did his doctoral work under advisors Ronald A. Howard, George B. Dantzig, Edward H. Shortliffe, and Patrick Suppes.

He is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of Microsoft. He has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2014 for "contributions to artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction."

He was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2013 for “research at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence.”

He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.

In 2015, he was awarded the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize, a biennial award for sustained and high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through the development of computational models of perception, reflection and action, and their application in time-critical decision making, and intelligent information, traffic, and healthcare systems.

In 2015, he was also awarded the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award, for "contributions to artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction spanning the computing and decision sciences through developing principles and models of sensing, reflection, and rational action."

He serves on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the US National Academies.

He has served as president of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), on the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Advisory Board, on the council of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), chair of the Section on Information, Computing, and Communications of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), on the Board of Regents of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), and a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) that was established in 2018 and issued its final report in March 2021.

Work

Horvitz's research interests span theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason. His contributions include advances in principles and applications of machine learning and inference, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, bioinformatics, and e-commerce.

Horvitz played a significant role in the use of probability and decision theory in artificial intelligence. His work raised the credibility of artificial intelligence in other areas of computer science and computer engineering, influencing fields ranging from human-computer interaction to operating systems. His research helped establish the link between artificial intelligence and decision science. As an example, he coined the concept of bounded optimality, a decision-theoretic approach to bounded rationality. The influences of bounded optimality extend beyond computer science into cognitive science and psychology.

He studied the use of probability and utility to guide automated reasoning for decision making. The methods include consideration of the solving of streams of problems in environments over time. In related work, he applied probability and machine learning to solve combinatorial problems and to guide theorem proving. He introduced the anytime algorithm paradigm in AI, where partial results, probabilities, or utilities of outcomes are refined with computation under different availabilities or costs of time, guided by the expected value of computation.

He has issued long-term challenge problems for AI—and has espoused a vision of open-world AI, where machine intelligences have the ability to understand and perform well in the larger world where they encounter situations they have not seen before.

He has explored synergies between human and machine intelligence. He introduced principles for using machine learning and decision theory to guide machine versus human initiative, methods that provide AI systems with understandings of when to transfer problem solving to humans, and the use of machine learning and planning techniques to identify and merge the complementary abilities of people and AI systems. In work on human-centered AI, he introduced measures and models of the expected value of displayed information to guide the display of information to human decision makers in time-critical settings and methods for making statistical AI inferences more understandable. He introduced models of human attention in computing systems, and studied the use of machine learning to infer the cost of interruptions to computer users. His use of machine learning to build models of human surprise was featured as a technology breakthrough by MIT Technology Review.

He investigated the use of AI methods to provide assistance to users including help with software and in the daily life.

He made contributions to multimodal interaction. In 2015, he received the ACM ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award for contributions to multimodal interaction. His work on multimodal interaction includes studies of situated interaction, where systems consider physical details of open-world settings and can perform dialog with multiple people.

He co-authored probability-based methods to enhance privacy, including a model of altruistic sharing of data called community sensing and risk-sensitive approaches including stochastic privacy.

He is Microsoft's top inventor.

He led efforts in applying AI methods to computing systems, including machine learning for memory management in Windows, web prefetching, graphics rendering, and web crawling. He did early work on AI for debugging software.

Horvitz speaks on the topic of artificial intelligence, including on NPR and the Charlie Rose show. Online talks include both technical lectures and presentations for general audiences, for example with the TEDx talk Making Friends with Artificial Intelligence. His research has been featured in The New York Times and MIT Technology Review. He has testified before the US Senate on progress, opportunities, and challenges with AI.

AI and society

He has addressed technical and societal challenges and opportunities with the fielding of AI technologies in the open world, including beneficial uses of AI, AI safety and robustness, and where AI systems and capabilities can have inadvertent effects, pose dangers, or be misused. He has presented on caveats with applications of AI in military settings. He and Thomas G. Dietterich called for work on AI alignment, saying that AI systems "must reason about what people intend rather than carrying out commands literally."

He has called for action on potential risks to civil liberties posed by government uses of data in AI systems. He and privacy scholar Deirdre Mulligan stated that society must balance privacy concerns with benefits of data for social benefit.

He has presented on the risks of AI-enabled deepfakes and contributed to media provenance technologies that cryptographically certify the source and history of edits of digital content.

Asilomar AI study

He served as President of the AAAI from 2007–2009. As AAAI President, he called together and co-chaired the Asilomar AI study which culminated in a meeting of AI scientists at Asilomar in February 2009. The study considered the nature and timing of AI successes and reviewed concerns about directions with AI developments, including the potential loss of control over computer-based intelligences, and also efforts that could reduce concerns and enhance long-term societal outcomes. The study was the first meeting of AI scientists to address concerns about superintelligence and loss of control of AI and attracted interest by the public.

In coverage of the Asilomar study, he said that scientists must study and respond to notions of superintelligent machines and concerns about artificial intelligence systems escaping from human control.

One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence

In 2014, Horvitz defined and funded with his wife the One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) at Stanford University. In 2016, the AI Index was launched as a project of the One Hundred Year Study.

According to Horvitz, the AI100 gift, which may increase in the future, is sufficient to fund the study for a century. A Stanford press release stated that sets of committees over a century will "study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play." A framing memo for the study calls out 18 topics for consideration, including law, ethics, the economy, war, and crime. Topics include abuses of AI that could pose threats to democracy and freedom and addressing possibilities of superintelligences and loss of control of AI.

The One Hundred Year Study is overseen by a Standing Committee. The Standing Committee formulates questions and themes and organizes a Study Panel every five years. The Study Panel issues a report that assesses the status and rate of progress of AI technologies, challenges, and opportunities with regard to AI's influences on people and society.

The 2015 study panel of the One Hundred Year Study, chaired by Peter Stone, released a report in September 2016, titled *"*Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030". The panel advocated for increased public and private spending on the industry, recommended increased AI expertise at all levels of government, and recommended against blanket government regulation. Panel chair Peter Stone argues that AI won't automatically replace human workers, but rather, will supplement the workforce and create new jobs in tech maintenance. While mainly focusing on the next 15 years, the report touched on concerns and expectations that had risen in prominence over the last decade about the risks of superintelligent robots, stating "Unlike in the movies, there's no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible. Stone stated that "it was a conscious decision not to give credence to this in the report."

The report of the second cycle of the AI100 study, chaired by Michael Littman, was published in 2021.

Founding of Partnership on AI

He co-founded and has served as board chair of the Partnership on AI, a non-profit organization bringing together Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft with representatives from civil society, academia, and non-profit R&D. The organization's website points at initiatives, including studies of risk scores in criminal justice, facial recognition systems, AI and economy, AI safety, AI and media integrity, and documentation of AI systems.

Microsoft Aether Committee

He founded and chairs the Aether Committee at Microsoft, Microsoft's internal committee on the responsible development and fielding of AI technologies. He reported that the Aether Committee had made recommendations on and guided decisions that have influenced Microsoft's commercial AI efforts. In April 2020, Microsoft published content on principles, guidelines, and tools developed by the Aether Committee and its working groups, including teams focused on AI reliability and safety, bias and fairness, intelligibility and explanation, and human-AI collaboration.

Publications

Books

Selected articles

Podcasts

References

References

  1. (11 March 2020). "Microsoft appoints its first-ever chief scientific officer". Engadget.
  2. "Dr. Eric Horvitz".
  3. "Eric Horvitz".
  4. Horvitz, Eric. (1990). "Computation and action under bounded resources".
  5. [http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/horvitz_4722252.cfm ERIC HORVITZ ACM Fellows 2014]
  6. "2013 SIGCHI Awards – ACM SIGCHI".
  7. "Election of New Members at the 2018 Spring Meeting | American Philosophical Society".
  8. "The AAAI Feigenbaum Prize". [[AAAI]].
  9. "ERIC HORVITZ - Award Winner". [[Association for Computing Machinery.
  10. "Eric Horvitz, MD PhD".
  11. "About the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board".
  12. "Board of Regents".
  13. Simonite, Tom. "This Group Pushed More AI in US Security—and Boosted Big Tech".
  14. Shead, Sam. (2021-03-02). "U.S. is 'not prepared to defend or compete in the A.I. era,' says expert group chaired by Eric Schmidt".
  15. Mackworth, Alan. (July 2008). "Introduction of Eric Horvitz". AAAI Presidential Address.
  16. (17 July 2015). "Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines". Science.
  17. (1 July 2016). "Predicting Short-term Remembering as Boundedly Optimal Strategy Choice". Cognitive Science.
  18. Horvitz, Eric. (February 2001). "Principles and Applications of Continual Computation". Artificial Intelligence.
  19. (July 2001). "A Bayesian Approach to Tackling Hard Computational Problems". Proceedings of the Conference on Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence.
  20. Horvitz, Eric. (July 1987). "Reasoning about beliefs and actions under computational resource constraints". AUAI Press.
  21. Horvitz, Eric. (August 1988). "Reasoning under varying and uncertain resource constraints". AAAI Press.
  22. (August 1989). "Reflection and action under scarce resources: theoretical principles and empirical study". Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc..
  23. Horvitz, Eric. (December 1990). "Computation and Action Under Bounded Resources". Stanford University.
  24. (August 1996). "Challenge Problems for Artificial Intelligence". Proceedings of AAAI-96, Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Portland, Oregon.
  25. Horvitz, Eric. (July 2008). "Artificial Intelligence in the Open World". AAAI Presidential Lecture.
  26. Horvitz, Eric. (Jan 13, 2020). "2019 Annual Meeting Plenary: People, Machines, and Intelligence".
  27. Horvitz, Eric. (May 1999). "Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems the CHI is the limit - CHI '99". ACM.
  28. (2007-03-01). "Complementary computing: policies for transferring callers from dialog systems to human receptionists". User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.
  29. (8 June 2018). "Combining human and machine intelligence in large-scale crowdsourcing". International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
  30. (2020-07-09). "Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence".
  31. (August 1995). "Display of information for time-critical decision making". Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc.
  32. (October 1986). "The use of a heuristic problem-solving hierarchy to facilitate the explanation of hypothesis-directed reasoning". Proceedings of Medinfo.
  33. (March 2003). "Models of attention in computing and communication: from principles to applications". ACM.
  34. Markhoff, John. (17 July 2000). "Microsoft Sees Software 'Agent' as Way to Avoid Distractions". The New York Times.
  35. (2003-11-05). "Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Multimodal interfaces". Association for Computing Machinery.
  36. (2004-11-06). "Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work". Association for Computing Machinery.
  37. Waldrop, M. Mitchell. (19 February 2008). "TR10: Modeling Surprise".
  38. (July 1998). "The Lumiere Project: Bayesian User Modeling for Inferring the Goals and Needs of Software Users". Proceedings of UAI, Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
  39. (2009-08-31). "Lumiere - Intelligent User Interface".
  40. (2017-02-09). "How the forgetfulness of one of Microsoft's top scientists inspired a killer new feature for Windows 10".
  41. (2020-02-21). "Information Agents: Directions and Futures (2001)".
  42. "ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award".
  43. (November 2009). "Dialog in the Open World: Platform and Applications". ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.
  44. (2019). "The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces, Volume 3". Association for Computing Machinery and Morgan & Claypool.
  45. (2014-04-08). "Elevating human-computer interaction to a new level of sophistication".
  46. (September 2009). "Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference on the 10th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue - SIGDIAL '09".
  47. (April 2008). "Proceedings of IPSN 2008".
  48. (November 2010). "A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services". Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
  49. (July 2014). "Stochastic Privacy". AAAI.
  50. (2019-05-28). "Swimming in Creative Waters: The Art of Invention".
  51. Keizer, Gregg. (2007-01-19). "Microsoft Predicts The Future With Vista's SuperFetch".
  52. Horvitz, Eric. (1998-11-01). "Proceedings of the seventh international conference on Information and knowledge management". Association for Computing Machinery.
  53. (2013-02-06). "Perception, Attention, and Resources: A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Graphics Rendering".
  54. (2019-07-18). "Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval". Association for Computing Machinery.
  55. (1995-03-01). "Structure and chance: melding logic and probability for software debugging". Communications of the ACM.
  56. Hansen, Liane. (21 March 2009). "Meet Laura, Your Virtual Personal Assistant". NPR.
  57. Kaste, Martin. (11 Jan 2011). "The Singularity: Humanity's Last Invention?". [[NPR]].
  58. Rose, Charlie. "A panel discussion about Artificial Intelligence".
  59. TEDx Talks. (2013-02-19). "Making Friends With Artificial Intelligence: Eric Horvitz at TEDxAustin".
  60. Markoff, John. (10 April 2008). "Microsoft Introduces Tool for Avoiding Traffic Jams". The New York Times.
  61. Markoff, John. (17 July 2000). "Microsoft Sees Software 'Agent' as Way to Avoid Distractions". The New York Times.
  62. Lohr, Steve, and Markoff, John. (24 June 2010). "Smarter Than You Think: Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back". The New York Times.
  63. Horvitz, Eric. (30 November 2016). "Reflections on the Status and Future of Artificial Intelligence".
  64. (2016-06-13). "AI for Social Good (2016): Keynote AI in Support of People and Society".
  65. Horvitz, Eric. (2016-06-27). "Reflections on Safety and Artificial Intelligence".
  66. Horvitz, Eric. (7 July 2017). "AI, people, and society". Science.
  67. (October 2015). "Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions". Communications of the ACM.
  68. (2018-04-09). "Conference on Ethics & AI: Keynote Session".
  69. Horvitz, Eric. (2017-03-28). "The Long View: AI Directions, Challenges, and Futures".
  70. (2019-11-15). "Keynote Address, Eric Horvitz: AI Advances, Aspirations—and Concerns".
  71. (2021-05-17). "Caution ahead: Navigating risks to freedoms posed by AI".
  72. (17 July 2015). "Data, privacy, and the greater good". Science.
  73. (2021-07-15). "AMP: Authentication of media via provenance". Association for Computing Machinery.
  74. Horvitz, Eric. (2021-02-22). "A promising step forward on disinformation".
  75. Markoff, John. (26 July 2009). "Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man". York Times.
  76. Siegel, Robert. (11 January 2011). "The Singularity: Humanity's Last Invention?". NPR.
  77. You, Jia. (9 January 2015). "A 100-year study of artificial intelligence? Microsoft Research's Eric Horvitz explains". Science.
  78. (15 December 2014). "Study to Examine Effects of Artificial Intelligence". The New York Times.
  79. (2016). "Preface {{!}} One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)".
  80. (2014). "One-Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence: Reflections and Framing". Eric Horvitz.
  81. (2016). "Artificial intelligence and life in 2030".
  82. (1 September 2016). "Report: Artificial intelligence to transform urban cities". [[Houston Chronicle]].
  83. (4 September 2016). "AI in the real world: Tech leaders consider practical issues.". [[The Christian Science Monitor]].
  84. Peter Stone et al. "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030." One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence: Report of the 2015-2016 Study Panel, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, September 2016. Doc: http://ai100.stanford.edu/2016-report. Accessed: October 1, 2016.
  85. (1 September 2016). "Artificial intelligence wants to be your bro, not your foe". [[MIT Technology Review]].
  86. (2021). "Gathering Strength, Gathering Storms: The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) 2021 Study Panel Report {{!}} One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)".
  87. Stacey, Kevin. (16 Sep 2021). "New Report Assesses Progress and Risks of Artificial Intelligence".
  88. McKendrick, Joe. (18 Sep 2021). "Artificial intelligence success is tied to ability to augment, not just automate".
  89. (2019-04-23). "Report on Algorithmic Risk Assessment Tools in the U.S. Criminal Justice System".
  90. (2020-02-18). "Bringing Facial Recognition Systems To Light".
  91. (2019-04-30). "AI, Labor, and the Economy Case Study Compendium".
  92. (2019-12-04). "Introducing SafeLife: Safety Benchmarks for Reinforcement Learning".
  93. (2019-12-05). "AI and Media Integrity Steering Committee".
  94. "About ML".
  95. Nadella, Satya. (2018-03-29). "Satya Nadella email to employees: Embracing our future: Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge".
  96. (2019-07-17). "Microsoft #TechTalk: AI and Ethics".
  97. Boyle, Alan. (9 April 2018). "Microsoft is turning down some sales over AI ethics, top researcher Eric Horvitz says". GeekWire.
  98. (9 April 2018). "Conference on Ethics & AI: Keynote Session". Carnegie Mellon University.
  99. "Responsible AI principles from Microsoft".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

living-peopleamerican-computer-scientistspeople-in-information-technologymicrosoft-employeesfellows-of-the-american-academy-of-arts-and-sciencesfellows-of-the-association-for-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligencepresidents-of-the-association-for-the-advancement-of-artificial-intelligencemembers-of-the-american-philosophical-societyyear-of-birth-missing-(living-people)microsoft-technical-fellows