Dr. Stan Franklin dies: Memphis genius pioneered 'Artificial Intelligence'

"Are computer viruses alive?

"Do machines have rights?

"Can artificial intelligence be created in a lab or shop?

"University of Memphis professor Dr. Stan Franklin navigates concepts that make the average person's head swim."

Those provocative sentences appear at the start of a 1995 profile of Dr. Stan Franklin in The Commercial Appeal. In the decades since, the ideas they express remained just as tantalizing for Franklin, a genuine genius, according to colleagues, who dedicated his life to navigating, charting and discerning new and mind-blowing concepts in mathematics and computer science.

And he did it from an operating base at one of the nation's unsung bastions of significant research, the Institute for Intelligent Systems, which he co-founded, at the University of Memphis.

"He was a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence," said psychology professor Dr. Art Graesser, 72, who turned down a high-paying job with IBM to come to Memphis in 1985, to work with Franklin.

Graesser was referring to a field of study — Artificial Intelligence, or AI — that may be the hottest in science, at least in this corner of the multiverse (to allude to another hot concept). "Stan's models tried to simulate how the human mind works, psychologically," Graesser said. "Imagine a computer that could have consciousness."

Franklin — who imagined that, and much more — died Jan. 23 at his East Memphis home, after a series of recent health dilemmas. He was 91.

In the parlance of the newspaper obituary, Franklin leaves eight children.

He also leaves a new subfield of mathematics, "sequential spaces," introduced in his 1965 paper "Spaces for which Sequences Suffice"; various software implementations related to AI that are used by the U.S. Navy, among others; a computer literacy program at FedEx that was one of the first of its kind in the nation; the landmark 1995 MIT Press book, "Artificial Minds," which at the time was the definitive guide to a burgeoning field; close to $100 million in grant money, which he and his Institute colleagues attracted to the university; and, of course, the Institute for Intelligent Systems itself, founded in 1987 as an interdisciplinary research center that united mathematicians, computer engineers, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and others in the pursuit of "cognitive science" (the study of the mind and its processes).

Franklin even has an entry in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which credits him with developing ways of modeling human and animal thinking with computers; and he is showcased in the new interactive exhibit at the Pink Palace/Museum of Science & History, "Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind & the Machine," which is up through May 6. The exhibit labels him an "AI Innovator," and describes him as a "mentor" to "future generations of cognitive scientists."

A lifelong and "proud" Memphian (according to his daughter, Sunny Franklin), Stanley Phillip Franklin spent much of his childhood working at Franklin's Gilt Edge Department Store, a store at the corner of Hollywood and Chelsea owned by his parents, Sam and Lily Franklin. He attended Christian Brothers High School and the University of Memphis, then earned a mathematics Ph.D. at UCLA, where he specialized in topology, a field of math involving geometric objects and spatial relationships. He also served a stint in the Marines as an aerial navigator, during the Korean War.

He taught or conducted research at the University of Florida, Tulane University, Carnegie Mellon University, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam and The Technion — The Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. But he spent most of his career in Memphis, returning to his hometown alma mater in 1972 to be chair of the Mathematical Sciences department, which he transformed from primarily a teaching to a research department.

Franklin's reputation attracted other mathematicians to Memphis, especially after the founding of the Institute and then the publication of his book, which Graesser says was "20 years ahead of its time. It explained in a very clear way what AI was all about."

At the time, AI was a generally unfamiliar concept for much of the public, except for in connection with science-fiction robots and sinister machines, such as the HAL 9000 computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey." But what once seemed restricted to a Stanley Kubrick spaceship orbiting Jupiter is now in your pocket, with AI technologies and programs such as ChatGPT operating on cellphones. Franklin's book conceptualized some of the ideas that led to these advances, such as computer "neural networks."

In an interview with The Commercial Appeal, Franklin said he was developing "a new way of thinking about minds" by digging into such ancient questions as "How does intelligence happen? How do mental functions arise from the physical?" He said his work had "ramifications for humans, for animals, for autonomous robots, for artificial life living in a computer, for software agents running around the Internet..."

But also, he said, his work was fun. "It's like exploring outer space. There's no end to it..."

Until recently, Franklin been in remarkably good health, especially for a nonagenarian, according to family members. For years beyond his official retirement, he remained active as a professor emeritus at the U of M. He was a lover of the outdoors, and he practiced tai chi.

Franklin leaves his wife, Jeannie Stonebrook; three sons, Bruce Franklin of Los Angeles, Phillip Franklin of Overland Park, Kansas, and Sam Franklin of Memphis; and five daughters, Elena Franklin Berman of Mountain View, California, and Lynn Franklin, Michele Safa, Hallie Franklin and Sunny Franklin, all of Memphis; a brother, Jerome Franklin of Memphis; (Incidentally, Franklin's youngest children, 35-year-old Sunny and Sam, are twins; and some of the kids are chips off the old Hilbert cube: Safa is a professor of anthropology at the U of M, while Berman is chief science officer at Kairos Aerospace.)

Services are at Baron Hirsch Cemetery at 10 a.m. Friday, Jan. 27. Canale Funeral Directors has charge.

The family requests any donations be made to the Wolf River Conservancy.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Stan Franklin dies: Memphis genius pioneered 'Artificial Intelligence'