Helen Chan Wolf

Helen Chan Wolf is an artificial intelligence pioneer who worked on facial recognition technology and Shakey the robot, the world's first autonomous robot, at SRI International.

Career In the early 1960s, Wolf worked with Charles Bisson and Woody Bledsoe at Panoramic Research to train computers in recognising human faces (so-called automated facial recognition). Early computer programs used humans to coordinate a set of features from images of faces and then a computer for the recognition. These features included things such as the positions the inside and outside corners of eyes and mouth. Operators such as these could process around forty pictures an hour.

Wolf joined the Artificial Intelligence group at SRI International (then Stanford Research Institute) in 1966. At the SRI Chan was part of the Application of Intelligent Automata to Reconnaissance project. Here she worked on Shakey the robot, the world's first mobile autonomous robot, which was honoured by an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Milestone in 2017. Shakey used artificial intelligence, making its own plans, navigating between places and improving through learning. Wolf developed the algorithms that extracted coordinates from images.

Selected publications Her publications include: