Stanford Engineering: Laying the Foundation for Today’s Generative AI
Christopher Manning, professor of linguistics and of computer science, co-founder of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and recipient of the 2024 IEEE John von Neumann Medal, remembers the moment he knew he wanted to study language.
“One day in high school English class, I came across one of my teacher’s personal books that dealt with linguistics and the structure of human languages,” he says. “I began reading it, and found out about the International Phonetic Alphabet, which provides a common set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of sounds in any language. At the time, I’d spent many hours learning the spelling of English words – many of which were arbitrary and strange – for spelling tests, and I’d also studied some French and Latin. This was the first thing I saw that captured a guiding idea of linguistics, that there is something useful to be achieved by studying human languages in general and trying to produce a common science across all human languages. It was the reason I first began studying linguistics as an undergrad.”
Four decades later, Manning’s ongoing fascination with human language – and his pioneering efforts to help computers learn, understand, and generate that language – have made him a renowned and ground-breaking figure in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning.
