Patrick Henry Winston is an American computer scientist, and is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succeeding Marvin Minsky, who left to help found the MIT Media Lab and succeeded by Rodney Brooks. Brooks assisted with merging the lab with the MIT Lab for Computer Science, to form the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Winston's thesis work with Marvin Minskyconcerned the difficulty of learning; he concluded it was only possible to learn something one nearly already knows. He is active in research and interested in machine learning and human intelligence. Winston is known within the MIT community for his strong commitment to supporting MIT undergraduate culture.^{[citation needed]}

As of December 2013, Winston teaches 6.034: Artificial Intelligence and 6.803/6.833: Human Intelligence Enterprise. Winston is also an author of a number of computer science and AI textbooks, including:

• Artificial Intelligence ISBN 0201533774
• The Psychology of Computer Vision ISBN 0070710481
• Lisp (with Berthold K. P. Horn) ISBN 0201083191
• On to C ISBN 020158042X
• On to C++ ISBN 0201580438
• On to Java (with Sundar Narasimhan) ISBN 0201725932
• On to Smalltalk ISBN 0201498278

He is also an alumnus of the Mass Gamma chapter of Phi Delta Theta.^{[citation needed]}