Jeff Shrager, PhD. Chief Scientist, Bennu Climate, Inc, jshrager@bennuclimate.com
My personal email is jshrager@gmail.com, and here's my linkedin account.
See my vita for more details regarding my research.
I was an adjunct professor in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford from about 2000-2025. Students seeking a letter of recommendation should contact me at jshrager@gmail.com
(If you're looking for the Stanford surgeon, Dr. Joseph Shrager, see: https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/joseph-shrager)
Significant and Recent Projects
- Executable Archaeology: Studying historical computational systems by reconstructing and running their original programs: the Logic Theorist (the first AI), the Simon–Yngve sentence generator, and the Heuristic Coder, all from their original IPL-V code, via a new Lisp IPL-V interpreter and an IBM 1620 emulator. [Logic Theorist paper]
- A Small Math Model: Recasting Siegler & Shrager's strategy-choice model of arithmetic learning in an LLM-inspired architecture (NeurIPS MATH-AI 2025).
- Bennu Climate: Chief scientist at a methane-removal startup; built and run an atmospheric photocatalysis lab. [AGU 2024]
- ELIZAGEN: The genealogy of ELIZA. We rediscovered Weizenbaum's original code in 2021 and made it run in 2023; UNESCO later named it one of the most important programs of all time. [IEEE Annals] [MIT Press book] [podcast]
- Cognitive engineering at SLAC: Applying cognitive engineering to instrument operations at LCLS, the world's largest x-ray laser (early 2020s).
- Global Cumulative Treatment Analysis: A new way to run clinical trials, proposed ~2013 and validated with virtual trials in 2022. [Is Cancer Solvable?]
- CollabRx and xCures: Co-founder and CTO of two AI-based biomedical startups; CollabRx was acquired in 2012.
- Bayesian Community (Xerox PARC): Distributed collaborative information analysis based on a "Bayes community" model of collaboration (~2010).
- BioBIKE / BioLingua: The first intelligent, through-the-web programmable scientific computing platform (Carnegie Institution, 2000-2008).
- Chlamydomonas genomics: The first complete genome build and a microarray for Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (Carnegie Institution).
- Phytoplankton microbiology: Marine and freshwater phytoplankton environmental microbiology (Carnegie Institution).
- Diary of an Insane Cell Mechanic: A psychologist's descent into molecular biology: a participant-observer diary of becoming a biologist (2000). [chapter]
- Afferent Systems: First employee at an AI-based robotic drug-discovery startup, acquired in 2000.
- Waves of cortical growth: A neural-network model of how the brain's computational subsystems become organized, a precursor of later deep networks (CMU, early 1990s).
- The power law of practice: Experimental and mathematical accounts of the power law of learning and spreading activation (Xerox PARC, late 1980s; Science 1987, 1988).
- Children learning with parents: How children learn to interpret the world while cooking, reading, and visiting a science museum with their parents (Xerox PARC).
- Instructionless learning: A computational model of exploratory learning based on "view application" (CMU, early 1980s).
- Strategy choice in arithmetic: With Bob Siegler, a hybrid model of how children learn simple arithmetic and discover new strategies (CMU, 1980s-90s).
- An expert system that volunteers advice: The first goal-recognizing, mixed-initiative AI help system, a precursor of "wizards" (and Clippy) (Penn, 1982).
- APL.MS: Built and supported Univac's APL environment (Penn, late 1970s).
- ELIZA in BASIC: Written in middle school and published in Creative Computing in 1977; became one of the most widely copied programs of the PC era.