Academic Lineage
aihistoryproject.org
Academic Lineage
Who taught whom. Doctoral advisors traced from Wikidata, revealing the schools AI grew out of — and that the field has no single family tree, but 14 separate ones.
On the timeline (85) — click to openTeachers outside it (98)· advisor → student, left to right
The John McCarthy line8 on the timeline · 17 people
The David Rumelhart line7 on the timeline · 12 people
The Herbert A. Simon line5 on the timeline · 9 people
The Geoffrey Hinton line5 on the timeline · 8 people
The John Holland line4 on the timeline · 8 people
The Fei-Fei Li line3 on the timeline · 7 people
The Leslie Kaelbling line2 on the timeline · 7 people
The Alain Colmerauer line2 on the timeline · 6 people
The Jürgen Schmidhuber line2 on the timeline · 5 people
The Roger Schank line2 on the timeline · 5 people
The John Hopfield line2 on the timeline · 4 people
The Marvin Minsky line2 on the timeline · 4 people
The Shane Legg line2 on the timeline · 4 people
The Yoshua Bengio line2 on the timeline · 4 people
What the Lines Show
Piaget
Papert’s teacher
Seymour Papert studied under the child psychologist Jean Piaget — which is why Logo was about how children think.
Simon
The CMU line
Herbert Simon taught Allen Newell and Edward Feigenbaum; between them they trained Richard Fikes and Douglas Lenat.
4 steps
Skinner to Abbeel
B. F. Skinner → William Estes → David Rumelhart → Michael I. Jordan → Andrew Ng: behaviourism to deep learning in four handovers.
No root
A forest, not a tree
The chains never meet. AI’s researchers descend from separate mathematical, psychological and linguistic traditions.
134 advisor links across 183 people · doctoral advisor data from Wikidata (CC0)Hover a name to trace its chain