MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
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The MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was an interdisciplinary research entity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which became one of the most influential and accomplished in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Research at MIT in the field of artificial intelligence began in 1959. In 1963, the (then) "AI Group" was incorporated into the newly-formed Project MAC, only to split off again in 1970, as the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2003, the AI Lab (as it is commonly abbreviated) was merged with the Laboratory for Computer Science, the descendant of Project MAC, to form CSAIL.
Founders included Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy (who invented Lisp) and a talented community of computer programmers. In the 1950s - 1970s, they shared a computer room with a computer (initially a PDP-6, and later a PDP-10) for which they built a time-sharing operating system called ITS.
Talented programmers such as Richard Stallman, who used TECO to write EMACS, flourished in this environment.
The AI Lab was interested principally in the problems of vision, mechanical motion and manipulation, and language, which they view as the keys to more intelligent machines.
[edit] Directors of the AI Lab
- Marvin Minsky, 1970-1972
- Patrick Winston, 1972-1997
- Rodney Brooks, 1997-2003
[edit] See also
- Project MAC for more details of the split
- Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
- History of operating systems
[edit] External links
- The webpage for the successor of the AI Lab, CSAIL.
- "A Marriage of Convenience: The Founding of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory", Chious et al. - includes important information on the Incompatible Timesharing System.
