SIGART on AAAI's Founding

This article reprints a section of the January 1980 "Chairman's Message" of the SIGART Newsletter (No. 69). SIGART is the Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence, of the Association for Computing Machinery. At the time of AAAI's formation, SIGART, with its 3,800 members, was the principal AI organization in the United States, and its primary activity was publishing the Newsletter. The field of AI is mature enough that a national scientific organization is needed. Much of the immediate motivation for forming AAAI came from a growing sentiment within the U.S. AI community for a regularly-scheduled national conference.