A Pioneer of Artificial Intelligence
How does an unassuming kid from small-town Iowa become a pioneering scientist in artificial intelligence?
In the case of Greg Hager ’83—Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and assistant director for the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate—the answer is (fairly) simple: natural smarts, hard work, unrelenting drive, a bit of serendipity, and, yes, a small liberal arts college named Luther.
Greg Hager '83
In 1971, when Greg was just 10 years old, he began practicing basic math on a “teletype” computer at his school in Postville, Iowa, courtesy of Luther. “The college had received a grant from the state of Iowa to put modems and teletypes in all of the regional schools,” he recalls. “Because of that, I had early access to a computer and immediately knew that was what I wanted to do when I grew up.”
Fast forward to 1979, and Luther again loomed front and center. “I knew it was a place that valued computer science,” Greg says of his
decision to enroll.
Over the next four years, he majored in computer science and math and also, as a work-study student, wrote code that supported the grading system for the college. He also met two important faculty mentors: Walt Will and Craig Cornelius ’74, the latter of whom, says Greg, “piqued my interest in artificial intelligence.”
After graduation, Greg studied computer science on an National Science Foundation graduate fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Five years and one doctoral degree later, he traveled to Germany on a Fulbright to study at the University of Karlsruhe for a year. He then spent the next eight years as a faculty member at Yale University—where he began his groundbreaking research on vision-based robotics—before answering the call of JHU in 1999.
As founding director of the JHU Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, Greg has spearheaded transformative work on collaborative and vision-based robotics, time-series analysis of image data, and medical applications of image analysis and robotics. (He’s also authored more than 500 articles and books on these topics.) “We call it human-machine collaborative assistance,” he says when describing JHU’s Da Vinci machine and other surgical-assistant robots. “How can we build combinations of people and computing that can accomplish tasks that neither can accomplish alone?”
Greg will have an opportunity to enable research on this and many other questions in his newest role. As of June 3, he leads NSF’s CISE Directorate with a budget of nearly one billion dollars that funds 80 percent of non-defense-related computing research. “It’s an opportunity to collaborate with talented people to influence the direction of computing,” he says. “It’s a chance to articulate the value of computing to the broader science community. And it’s a way to give back to an organization, NSF, that has given so much to me for the past 33 years.”