Push Singh

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**Push Singh**

Born	May 14, 1972 Dehradun, India
Died	February 28, 2006 Cambridge, MA
Residence	USA
Field	Artificial intelligence
Institution	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since 1988)
Alma mater	Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BA Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD (2005)
Academic advisor	Marvin Minsky
Notable students	none
Known for	commonsense reasoning

Pushpinder Singh (May 14, 1972 - February 28, 2006) was a postdoctoral artificial intelligence researcher at MIT who specialized in commonsense reasoning. He was slated to begin a professorship at the MIT Media Lab in 2007 following a further postdoctoral position in industry. His death, which was reported as an "apparent suicide" in the MIT newspaper, The Tech, followed a struggle with ill-health and difficulty in working due to a back injury.

Push was gifted in his ability in helping people collaborate together, and in his vision of alternative approaches to artificial intelligence. From his web page at http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/, Push said:

"My research is focused on finding ways to give computers human-like common sense, the ability to think about the everyday world like people do. I believe this will enable a new generation of computing systems that will be much more powerful and friendly than those based on present-day technologies.

I am actively pushing a project at the Media Lab to develop programs capable of commonsense thinking. This is a very hands-on effort to build a suite of commonsense knowledge bases, inference engines, and architectural elements for linking these together, as well as new kinds of applications built on these technologies. These systems use multiple representations including semantic networks, propositional and first-order probabilistic graphical models, case bases of story scripts, rule based systems, logical axioms, shape descriptions, and even English sentences. For more details about this effort please visit the Media Lab's Computing web page.

My long-term goal is to understand how minds work, so that I can construct a machine that thinks. No small task, but I do have the advantage of an amazing mentor, the redoubtable Marvin Minsky."

[edit] Comparisons with McKinstry

There has been some public note of the similarity between the suicide of Push and that of another more renegade AI Researcher a couple months earlier, Chris McKinstry. Singh was expected to take Marvin Minsky's Position as a professor at MIT. McKinstry was destitute^{[citation needed]} and a hustler^{[citation needed]} without institutional affiliation living in penury^{[citation needed]} in Chile. Both of their AI projects and trajectories had in their last six years been incredibly similar (Wired News), namely Mckinstry's renegade Mindpixel project and Singh's MIT Institutionally backed Open Mind Common Sense. Both McKinstry and Singh were Canadians at some point (although Singh was born in India) of approximately the same age who had been in contact over the years in the same AI communities (AI Usenet 2000) regarding their similar projects. While the suicides may be completely unrelated, it is uncanny that both heterodox AI researchers were pursuing such closely themed endeavors, beta software projects and trajectories (For a few online comparisons See Streeb-Greebling,KurzweilAInet,Alphabet Soup)