Artificial Intelligence

These technologies would not exist today without the sustained federal support of fundamental AI research over the past three decades. This article was written for inclusion in the booklet "Computing Research: A National Investment for Leadership in the 21st Century," available from the Computing Research Association, cra.org/research.impact. Early work in AI focused on using cognitive and biological models to simulate and explain human information processing skills, on "logical" systems that perform commonsense and expert reasoning, and on robots that perceive and interact with their environment. This early work was spurred by visionary funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Office of Naval Research (ONR), which began on a large scale in the early 1960s and continues to this day. By the early 1980s an "expert systems" industry had emerged, and Japan and Europe dramatically increased their funding of AI research.