There have been a three points in my life where I have felt something like "this is something huge...it changes everything". The first was during an interaction with a Commodore Pet computer, loading a mine sweeper-type of game. Having a device that allowed users to change what it did and "executed" with simple commands was stunning. It felt like a writable and create-able world, at the hands of each individual. The second moment was in early 2000 as digital networks gave individuals the ability to effortlessly share their thoughts, reflections, and creations with the world through web 2.0/social media - anyone creating and anyone sharing.

Please note that in-person capacity for the event is limited, but spaces will be reserved for those with accepted work. UPDATE 3/11/21: Read More Intelligent Medicine: Leaders in biomedical informatics chart roadmap for harnessing the promise of medical AI, a summary of our 2020 Virtual Pre-Symposium. The Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Learning Health Systems (SAIL) is a new annual international conference exploring the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into clinical medicine. SAIL, which will be held in Hamilton, Bermuda, provides a forum for clinicians, clinical informaticians and AI researchers to discuss approaches and challenges to using these approaches in the healthcare domain. Researchers from the fields of clinical informatics and machine learning have been concerned for decades with bridging the gap between quantitative research and clinical practice.

When IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy – the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research – didn't see it that way. As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the "Drosophila of artificial intelligence" – a reference to the fruit flies biologists used to uncover the secrets of genetics – and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research had taken the analogy too far. "Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila," McCarthy wrote following Deep Blue's win. "We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."

Stanford, California 94305 THE STANFORD Artificial Intelligence Project, later known as the Stanford AI Lab or SAIL, was created by Prof. John McCarthy shortly after his arrival at Stanford in 1962. As a faculty member in the Computer Science Division of the Mathematics Department, McCarthy began supervising research in artificial intelligence an,d timesharing systems with a few students. From this small start, McCarthy built a large and active research organization involving many other faculty and research projects as well as his own. There is no single theme to the SAIL memos. They cannot be easily categorized because they show a diversity of interests, resulting from the diversity of investigators and projects. Nevertheless, there are some important dimensions to the research that took place in the Al Lab that I will try to put in historical context in this brief introduction. 'I thank John McCarthy, especially, for answering numerous questions and for reading the whole introduction for accuracy His advice, "don't try to unify the reports," preempted any contrary obligations I felt to readers Les Earnest was very helpful in giving me names and dates, providing photographs, and reading this account. I also appreciate time and information from Ed Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy, Jerry Feldman, Cordell Green, Roger Schank, Tony Hearn, Bill McKeeman and Nils Nilsson 2Readers should note that since the early 1970's there have been two centers of AI research at Stanford, SAIL and the Heuristic Programming Project (HPP). The HPP memos are not discussed here and are not part of the COMTEX collection. Instead, I have recounted some of the early history of SAIL, and its prehistory, as I remember it and have learned it from others' memories.' It is undesirable (and impossible besides) to try to unify the reports into a single theme, or to unify the research themes into a single purpose. Therefore, this mini-history mentions several themes (and a few names) from the 1960's and 70's that set the major directions of AI research at Stanford. Many of these early interests, such as robotics, have been vigorously pursued ever since. Omissions are unintentional, and should not be interpreted as having implied significance. The present collection is a complete set of SAIL memos from the beginning of the lab until 1982.2 The technical memos in the SAIL series are not of uniform quality. Some of these papers are preprints of journal articles of lasting interest. Others constitute documentation on how to use the system. Still others are hastily written drafts describing work in progress at the time.

THE STANFORD Artificial Intelligence Project, later reports to attempt to place each person, or report, in context.