Meisel, William S.: - William Meisel, Ph.D., is a technology expert in Artificial Intelligence who wrote a book on machine learning while a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at USC. He later ran the Computer Science Division of a defense company and founded and ran a company developing speech recognition technology. He is currently a writer and technology analyst in using human language to converse with computers. The "near future" in the book is one he expects.