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Stanford University centers and institutes

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The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (also known as Stanford AI Lab or SAIL) is the artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory of Stanford University.

It was started in 1963 by John McCarthy, after he moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Stanford. From 1965 to 1980, it was housed in the D.C. Power building (named after an executive of GTE), in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Stanford. During this period it one of the leading centres for AI research.

In 1980, its activities were merged into the university's Computer Science Department and it moved into Margaret Jacks Hall in the main Stanford campus.

SAIL was reopened in 2004, with Sebastian Thrun becoming its new director. SAIL's 21st century mission is to "change the way we understand the world"[1]; its researchers contribute to fields such as bioinformatics, cognition, computational geometry, computer vision, decision theory, distributed systems, game theory, image processing, information retrieval, knowledge systems, logic, machine learning, multi-agent systems, natural language, neural networks, planning, probabilistic inference, sensor networks, and robotics[1].

Early years

The old SAIL building[2] was located far enough away from campus that you needed a bicycle or car to get there[citation needed]. Combined with the rather extreme 1960s architecture of the place[2], this led to a certain isolation and feeling of being already in the future[citation needed]. Unfortunately, the building was damaged during the Loma Prieta earthquake and the university decided to level the site.

SAIL alumni played a major role in many Silicon Valley firms, becoming founders of now-large firms such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems as well as smaller companies such as Vicarm Inc. (acquired by Unimation), Foonly, Imagen, Xidex, and Valid Logic Systems[3]. Research accomplishments at SAIL were many, including in the fields of speech recognition and robotics.

SAIL also created the WAITS operating system[3]. WAITS ran on various models of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 computers, starting with the PDP-6, then the KA10 and KL10. At one time, the SAIL system was a triple processor KL10/KA10/PDP-6. The SAIL system was shut down in 1991[3].

SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, was developed by Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproull of the Stanford AI Lab in 1970[4].

See also

References

  1. ^ a b http://ai.stanford.edu/
  2. ^ a b Photos of SAIL places and people
  3. ^ a b c The autobiography of SAIL, a copy of a 1991 email about SAIL, from a Stanford website
  4. ^ Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

External links

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