This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – the World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid organized the Online Roundtable “A New Social Contract in the Age of AI”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – the World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid organized the Online Roundtable “A New Social Contract in the Age of AI”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – the World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid organized the Online Roundtable “A New Social Contract in the Age of AI” on May 12, 2020.

The Roundtable was organized by the WLA-CdM in conjunction with Boston Global Forum. Panelists of the roundtable included professors and former head of states and governments. Members include the authors of the Social Contract 2020 – Thomas Patterson, Nazli Choucri, Alex Pentland, David Silbersweig, and Nguyen Anh Tuan. The full working title of this was “The Social Contract 2020, A New Social Contract in the Age of AI”. 

This roundtable, albeit happening just in the past year, is a contributing stone to the foundation and the road to the Social Contract 2020, which was released later that year. Thus, the HAI project considers this a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence, in broader society.

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum formally introduces expert systems

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum formally introduces expert systems

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum formally introduces expert systems in 1965. He was a part of the Stanford Heuristic Programming Project, which contained other notable AI pioneers.

Edward Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist focused on Artificial Intelligence. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University for both his B.S. and Ph.D., with Herbert Simon, an AI pioneer, as his doctoral advisor. He would go on to work at UC Berkeley and Stanford, the latter where he became Professor Emeritus of Computer Science (since 2000). Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 with Raj Reddy for pioneering in AI and demonstrating its commercial potential.

The Stanford Heuristic Programming Project included members outside of Edward Feigenbaum such as Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi. They are most notable for the MYCIN experiments. Many of their papers and research can be read here.

Expert systems would become the basis for future AI products and developments. Furthermore, the members who were a part of this project would also work on other pioneering projects in A. Thus, the HAI initiative sees this event as a marker in the history of AI.

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – The Book of Why by Judea Pearl was published in 2018

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – The Book of Why by Judea Pearl was published in 2018

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – The Book of Why by Judea Pearl was published on 15 May, 2018. The book discusses causality and Bayesian probability, as well as their relations to fields such as AI and statistics.

Judea Pearl is a renowned Israeli-American computer scientist. He is a pioneer into Baynesian networks, probabilistic approaches to AI, and causal inference. He is also known for his other books, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems (1988) and Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (2000). Professor Pearl won the Turing Award, one of the highest honours in the field of computer science, in 2011, for his works into AI through probabilistic and causal reasoning. He is a Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA.

 The Book of Why (2018) can be bought through various booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Nobles, but further background information and supplementary materials can be found here.

Due to the impact that the book has, the History of AI initiative considers it an important marker in AI history. Professor Judea Pearl is one of the most influential computer scientists around the world. He is a Mentor of AI World Society Innovation Network (AIWS.net). Professor Pearl resides on the History of AI Board. He was honored as 2020 World Leader in AI World Society by Michael Dukakis Institute and the Boston Global Forum. 

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum formally introduces expert systems

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi began work on Dendral

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi began work on Dendral in 1965. This was an AI project that later also became the first expert system.

Edward Feigenbaum is an American computer scientist focused on Artificial Intelligence. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University for both his B.S. and Ph.D., with Herbert Simon, an AI pioneer, as his doctoral advisor. He would go on to work at UC Berkeley and Stanford, the latter where he became Professor Emeritus of Computer Science (since 2000). Feigenbaum received the ACM Turing Award in 1994 with Raj Reddy for pioneering in AI and demonstrating its commercial potential.

Dendral was deveveloped at Stanford beginning in 1965, after the question “Can machines think?” became popularized. Led by Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi, and assisted by associates and students, the project sought to study hypothesis formation and discovery in science. “Dendral” is a portmanteau of “Dendritic Algorithm”. Many expert systems that came after, such as XCON, were derived from Dendral.

The beginning of this project is considered an event in the history of AI due to the project itself contributing much to the development of AI. Dendral itself was both a culmination of past AI interests and the sparking of new ones. Thus, the HAI initiative sees the project as a marker in the history of AI.

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Marvin Minsky publishes “The Society of Mind”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Marvin Minsky publishes “The Society of Mind”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Marvin Minsky publishes The Society of Mind in 1987. This book is a theoretical description of the mind as a collection of cooperating agents.

Marvin Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist. He penned the research proposal for the Dartmouth Conference, which coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, and he was a participant in it when it was hosted in 1956. Minsky would also make significant contributions to artificial intelligence, both in the study of the field and in popular culture. He won the Turing Award in 1969. 

The Society of Mind is a book on the theory of “Society of Mind”, which came out of Marvin Minsky’s own thinking. In the book, Minsky describes the mind as a collection of mindless but cooperating “agents”. He first started developing the theory with Seymour Papert in the 1970s, but worked on it and published the book at a later point. The book is viewable at the Internet Archive.

Although the book does not directly reference or influence the development of artificial intelligence, it displays the theoretical dimensions of Marvin Minsky, the AI pioneer. The book also gives a glimpse into Minsky’s thinking in building artificial intelligence. Thus, the HAI initiative considers this an event in the history of AI.

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – John McCarthy proposed the ‘advice taker’ in his paper “Programs with Common Sense”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – John McCarthy proposed the ‘advice taker’ in his paper “Programs with Common Sense”

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – John McCarthy proposed the “advice taker” in his paper “Programs with Common Sense.” This hypothetical program was the first to use logic to represent information. The paper was published in 1959.

John McCarthy was an American computer scientist. He, along with Minsky and others, co-wrote the proposal for the Dartmouth Conference, and participated in it. McCarthy also developed the Lisp programming language. He spent most of his career at Stanford after working at Dartmouth and MIT. McCarthy won the Turing Award in 1971.

McCarthy wrote and published the paper while he was a part of the Computer Science at Stanford University. It can be viewed and downloaded here.

The HAI initiative considers this an event in the history of AI due to the paper being one of the earliest developments in artificial intelligence. Furthermore, John McCarthy is one of the pivotal figures in the growth of the field, having been there at the Dartmouth Conference.