Dr. Michael Mauldin, better known as “Fuzzy”, because “Michael” is nearly useless as a discriminator, was a graduate student at CMU from 1981 to 1989, earning a PhD in artificial intelligence for his work on AI-based information retrieval. He earned a double major, cum laude, in Mathematical Science and Computer Science from Rice University in 1981 (Sid Richardson College). Failing to find work during the AI Winter of 1990, he stayed on at CMU, and was appointed Research Computer Scientist in 1991. In 1995 he went on leave and never returned. His work with Drs. Appel, Jacobson, and Hamey on ROG-O-MATIC, the first computer program to retrieve the “Amulet of Yendor”, was profiled in Scientific American in 1985. He coined the term “Chatterbots” to describe his work on conversational programs such as JULIA, GLORIA, and SYLVIE. SYLVIE was sold to Avaya for one million dollars in 2013. His 1994 paper, “Chatterbots, Tinymuds, and the Turing test”, remains his most cited scholarly work. He also wrote LYCOS, the first Web Search Engine to become a publically traded company. He is currently severely retired and raises cattle on his hobby ranch in the Texas Hill Country.
