For me, AI is the "automation of tasks that humans perform". This can be simple or complex. I'm heavily influence by the classic text from Norvig and Russell https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

Here is my list of people that have influenced me, in no particular order. They have either written excellent books, or interesting software packages or interesting papers.

- Stuart Russell
- Peter Norvig
- Michael I. Jordan
- Zoubin Ghahramani
- David MacKay
- Neal Radford
- Kevin P. Murphy
- Richard McElreath
- Luc De Raedt
- Kristian Kersting
- Jude Shavlik
- Pedro Domingos
- Judea Pearl
- Vikash K. Mansinghka
- James Robert Lloyd
- David Duvenaud
- James Hensman
- Daniel Ritchie
- Guy Van den Broeck
- Robert Peharz
- Antonio Vergari
- Josh Tenenbaum
- Gary Marcus
- Neil Lawrence
- Allen B. Downey
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