Craig W. Stanfill

Craig W. Stanfill has had a lifelong fascination with artificial intelligence, dating from his time in high school at the dawn of the AI age. He pursued his dream and received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Maryland in 1983, after which he went to work for an innovative startup called Thinking Machines Corporation. While there, he pioneered the use of parallel computing in AI, information retrieval, and business computing. In 1994, the AI winter struck, Thinking Machines went bankrupt, and he caught the entrepreneur bug; he co-founded Ab Initio Software, a global software company based in Lexington, Massachusetts, that provides critical infrastructure for enterprise computing at Fortune 500 companies in finance, insurance, telecommunications, and retail. Upon retiring from the software industry, he turned to writing science fiction, where he continues to pursue his lifelong love of AI as a futurologist, commenting on the immense potential and danger of artificial intelligence.