Norvig is a councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and co-author, with Stuart J. Russell, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, now the leading college text in the field.[9] He was head of the Computational Sciences Division (now the Intelligent Systems Division) at NASA Ames Research Center, where he oversaw a staff of 200 scientists performing NASA's research and development in autonomy and robotics, automated software engineering and data analysis, neuroengineering, collaborative systems research, and simulation-based decision-making. Before that he was chief scientist at Junglee, where he helped develop one of the first Internet comparison-shopping services; chief designer at Harlequin Inc.; and senior scientist at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
Norvig is one of the creators of JScheme. Norvig is listed under "Academic Faculty & Advisors" for the Singularity University.[14] In 2011, Norvig worked with Sebastian Thrun to develop a popular online course in Artificial Intelligence[15] that had more than 160,000 students enrolled.[16] He also teaches an online course via the Udacity platform.[17]
In 2001, Norvig published a short article titled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years,[18] arguing against the fashionable introductory programming textbooks that purported to teach programming in days or weeks. The article was widely shared and discussed, and has attracted contributed translations to over 20 languages.[18]
Norvig is also known for his 2003 Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation,[19] a satire about bad presentation practices[20] using Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address.
His 2009 IEEE Intelligent Systems article, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data" co-authored with Alon Y. Halevy and Fernando Pereira, described how the best approach to highly complex natural language understanding problems is to harness large quantities of data, not to depend on "tidy", simple formulas.[8] They said that by generating "large amounts of unlabeled, noisy data, new algorithms can be used to build high-quality models from the data. This has informed the development of foundation models.[8] "But invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data."[8]: 9 "Choose a representation that can use unsupervised learning on unlabeled data, which is so much more plentiful than labeled data."[8]: 12 The title refers to the physicistEugene Wigner's 1960 journal article, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".[21]
In a 23 September 2010 lecture presented as part of the Vancouver-based University of British Columbia's Department of Computer Science's Distinguished Lecture Series, Norvig, who was then the Director of Research at Google, described how large quantities of data deepen our understanding of phenomena.[22]
In his June 2012 Ted Talk, described the fall of 2011 hybrid class on artificial intelligence attended by 100,000 online students around the globe that he co-taught with Sebastian ThrunatStanford University.[23]
