AI Rising
Nils J. Nilsson
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Abstract
Serious work toward artificial intelligence (AI) began about fifty
years ago. In this talk I review what I think are the major
milestones of our first half-century and make some guesses about what
might lie ahead. In the spirit of millennial appraisals, I will
survey what I think are the most important things we have learned
about AI in the last fifty years. Are these lessons sufficient to
produce human-level artificial intelligence within the next fifty?
About the Speaker
Nils J. Nilsson, Kumagai Professor of Engineering (Emeritus) in the
Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, received his
PhD degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1958. He spent
twenty-three years at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI
International working on statistical and neural-network approaches to
pattern recognition, co-inventing the A* heuristic search algorithm
and the STRIPS automatic planning system, directing work on the
integrated mobile robot, SHAKEY, and collaborating in the development
of the PROSPECTOR expert system. He has published five textbooks on
artificial intelligence. Professor Nilsson returned to Stanford in
1985 as the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science, a position
he held until August 1990. Besides teaching courses on artificial
intelligence and on machine learning, he has conducted research on
flexible robots that are able to react to dynamic worlds, plan courses
of action, and learn from experience. Professor Nilsson served on
the editorial boards of the journal Artificial Intelligence and of the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He was an Area Editor for
the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a
past-president and Fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence and is also a Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science. He was a founding director of Morgan Kaufmann
Publishers, Inc. In 1993, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal
Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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