Conference Report

Of special note was Deep Blue, the IBM computer system that beat then-reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Then there was the boom and bust of expert systems companies, the times when AI was the most popular computer science major, and the 1985 AAAI conference that had over 5,500 attendees. This was followed by what is commonly referred to as the "AI Winter." "This was not a prolonged phenomenon," observed Brachman. Indeed, in the current Presidential budget for fiscal year 2006, the Cognitive Computing Systems line item is $200 million, and the proposed 2007 budget is $240 million.