Organizing the Tutorials at AAAI-80

Fortunate to be one of the cofounders of AAAI, the author describes how the association was founded, how the first AAAI conference was planned, and how the first tutorial program was organized. I had been hired by Raj and Allen Newell to play a lead role on the Hearsay-II speech understanding project in 1976. After that, I moved to Rand Corporation and, shortly thereafter, took over the leadership of the research program in information processing systems, where the focus was on AI tools and applications and cognitive science. It was in that context that Raj spoke to me about his conviction that it was time for AI to become a recognized scientific profession, much as the AAAS and IEEE had done for natural science and engineering, respectively. This conversation was an example of Raj's modus operandi, the gap between vision and current state translated simply into gap-reducing actions.