During the fifteen years Peter Hart was at SRI International, the last several of which he was head of the Artificial Intelligence Center, he provided research leadership while making fundamental contributions to the fields of pattern recognition, machine vision, and artificial intelligence.
Peter Hart’s early research at SRI, with Dick Duda, led to the world’s first use of context in optical character recognition and to the development of one of the most widely used algorithms in image analysis. Their book, Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, is the ninth most-cited reference in the field of computer science.
Peter Hart led the Shakey robot project (started by Charlie Rosen in 1966) during its peak performance years in the early 1970s. He co-invented (with Nils Nilsson and Bert Raphael) the A* route-finding algorithm that is used in all of today’s automobile-based and web-based navigation systems as well as in video game software. A Shakey paper he co-authored with Nils Nilsson and Rich Fikes has been described as the most republished paper in the history of artificial intelligence.
Peter Hart is a Fellow of the IEEE, the ACM, the AAAI, and the Rensselaer Alumni Society. CiteseerX reports over 6,000 citations of his work, apparently among the most of any party or current SRI computer scientist.
In the late 1970s, Peter Hart spearheaded the development of the PROSPECTOR system for mineral exploration. This was the world’s first expert system with proven performance on an economically important problem, and it launched expert systems as a commercial activity.
On the Federal science policy front, Peter Hart served as an advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Administrator of NASA, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Strategic Air Command.
After leaving SRI, Peter Hart went on to co-found four companies and to direct two research centers, but his contributions while at SRI greatly enhanced the reputation of SRI and paved the way for the continuing excellence and renown of its Artificial Intelligence Center.