How the artificial intelligence revolution was born in a Vancouver hotel

Mel Silverman walked over to a whiteboard and picked up a marker, listing all the academic disciplines that the band of renegade scientists asking him for money represented. Assembled there 12 years ago at Vancouver's Metropolitan Hotel was a group of about 15 people, ranging from computer scientists to biologists to experimental engineers. What united them was their interest in a concept that was, at the time, generally perceived as the domain of the lunatic fringe. They believed it was possible to teach a machine to learn the same way a child does, through artificial neural networks that mimic the function of the human brain. In the process of teaching a machine to learn like a human, they figured there was likely a lot to discover about how humans learn as well.