Peter Stone (professor)

"The thing that stands out in my mind is the professor showing us pictures of various shapes such as triangles and squares, pointing out how easy it was for us to distinguish them, but then asserting that nobody knew how to write a computer program to do so (to date myself, this must have been the mid ’80s). I had already started programming computers, but this got me interested in the concept of modeling intelligence with computers."

"Reinforcement learning has been a relatively “niche” area of AI since I became interested in it my first year of graduate school. But with recent advances, I became convinced that now was the time to move to the next level and work on problems that are only possible to attack in a commercial setting."

"I’m made proud over and over again by the achievements of my students and postdocs. I’ve been very fortunate to work with a phenomenal group of individuals, both technically and personally. Nothing makes me happier than seeing each succeed in his or her own way, and to think that I played some small role in it."