IN BRIEF: Prof. Raymond J. Mooney is retiring after nearly 40 years as a leading AI figure at UT Austin. A prolific researcher, he published more than 200 papers and earned fellowships from the most prestigious professional organizations in his field. Mooney plans to spend his retirement writing a popular science book that chronicles the 60-year history of natural language processing, tracing the science back to its 1951 origins.
Raymond Mooney was eight years old when he fell in love with artificial intelligence. He just didn't know that's what it was called yet.
Ask Ray Mooney what sparked his interest in AI and he will tell you that his career trajectory began with the influence of two classic TV shows: Lost in Space, which featured Will Robinson and his trusted robot companion, and Gilligan's Island, which chronicled the adventures of seven people shipwrecked on an uncharted tropical island—a professor, who could solve any problem, being one of them. “I was a typical sci-fi geek kid,” he says. “I just put Gilligan's Island together with Lost in Space. I wanted to be the professor who makes robots since I was about eight years old. Literally.”
This August, Ray Mooney will officially retire from UTCS, ending a tenure that spans nearly four decades in a field that has transformed beyond recognition in that time. He arrived at UT in the rule-based AI era, when intelligent systems were built by hand-coding logical rules into inference engines. He leaves in the age of large language models, and intelligent systems that confirm his expectations about AI, as he outlined in the paper he wrote at 17 years old titled: "High-level Artificial Intelligence: An Imminent Possibility with an Enormous Potential for Good."
Since that time, Ray Mooney has published more than 200 research papers, primarily in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). He served as president of the International Machine Learning Society and has been recognized as a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, and ACL the three most significant professional bodies spanning artificial intelligence, computing, and computational linguistics. Recently, at a conference in Rabat Morocco, a colleague came up to tell him he had just crossed an H-index of 100, meaning he now has 100 papers that have each been cited at least 100 times.
Beyond research, Mooney has been a foundational figure in how UTCS thinks about AI. He has taught introductory machine learning for 20 years, introductory NLP for 13 years, and most recently a specialized graduate seminar on grounded NLP—connecting language to vision, action, and the physical world. He leads the Machine Learning Research Group and the Forum for Artificial Intelligence lecture series, which brings expert conversations on artificial intelligence to the UT community.
Prof. Mooney has also mentored a generation of researchers, motivating them to find and follow their own unique research visions. “You get grants to do research,” he says. “You don't do research to get grants.”
As for what comes next: a book. Mooney has been planning it for five years, and it is the answer he gives when anyone asks what retirement looks like. He wants to write a popular science book on the history and science of natural language processing—not a book about AI companies or tech industry disruption, but about the 60-plus years of research that made the current moment possible, explained for readers who want depth beyond the headlines. He traces the field back to Claude Shannon in 1951 and believes no one has told that story properly for a general audience.
In a way, the book will be the culmination of everything: the eight-year-old boy who wanted to build robots, the 17 year-old who wrote a paper that predicted a future many dismissed, and the researcher who spent four decades helping to build it.
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