Terry Winograd

Terry Winograd is Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. He earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, a BA in Mathematics from Colorado College in 1966, and studied Linguistics at University College London in 1967. From 1970 to 1973, he was an Instructor in Mathematics and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT. He joined Stanford in 1973 as Visiting Assistant Professor in Computer Science, advancing to Assistant Professor from 1974 to 1979, Associate Professor from 1979 to 1989, and Professor from 1989 to 2012, before becoming Professor Emeritus. During his tenure, he took leaves at Google from 2002 to 2003 and at Interval Research from 1992 to 1993. He consulted long-term for Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1972 to 1983, Action Technologies from 1987 to 1996, Interval Research from 1993 to 1998, and Google from 2001 to 2012. Winograd created and directed the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group and its teaching and research program for 20 years. He was a founding faculty member of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, and served on the faculty of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Winograd's research focuses on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He conducted pioneering research in artificial intelligence, particularly natural language understanding, during his PhD at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Key publications include the books Understanding Natural Language (1972), Language as a Cognitive Process: Volume I: Syntax (1983), and Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (1986, with Fernando Flores). He co-authored the PageRank Citation Ranking paper (1998) with Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and others. Winograd received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2011, was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2004 and became an ACM Fellow in 2009, earned the Rigo Award from ACM SIGDOC in 1999 and the Founders Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility in 1996, and was honored with an honorary D.Sc. from Colorado College in 1986. A founding member and president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility from 1987 to 1990, he served on its national board until 1996 and on editorial boards for journals including Human-Computer Interaction and ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. He has advised numerous companies founded by his students, including Google.

Professional Email: winograd@cs.stanford.edu