Artificial Intelligence: A New Mecca for Multidisciplinary Research

And because AI students are trained in such a rich multidisciplinary environment, they have excellent career opportunities. To make a thinking machine is one of humanity's oldest dreams. And since Allan Turing?s 1947 lectures on AI, programmable computers seemed to be the best way to go. Expectations were extraordinarily high in the 1950s and '60s, but without major breakthroughs, the whole subject lapsed temporarily into obscurity. Now, advances in the cognitive sciences that are improving our understanding of the nature of intelligence, memory, and perception from the biological perspective, coupled with the ready availability of ever-faster computers, are creating a second spring for AI--and a mecca for multidisciplinary scientists.