Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

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The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (also known as Stanford AI Lab or SAIL) is the artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory of Stanford University.

It was started in 1963 by John McCarthy, after he moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Stanford. From 1965 to 1980, it was housed in the D.C. Power building (named after an executive of GTE), in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Stanford. During this period it was one of the leading centres for AI research.

In 1980, its activities were merged into the university's Computer Science Department and it moved into Margaret Jacks Hall in the main Stanford campus.

SAIL was reopened in 2004, with Sebastian Thrun becoming its new director. SAIL's 21st century mission is to "change the way we understand the world"^[1]; its researchers contribute to fields such as bioinformatics, cognition, computational geometry, computer vision, decision theory, distributed systems, game theory, image processing, information retrieval, knowledge systems, logic, machine learning, multi-agent systems, natural language, neural networks, planning, probabilistic inference, sensor networks, and robotics^[1].

1 Early years
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Early years

The old SAIL building^[2], the D.C. Power Building, was located about 5 miles (8 km) from the main campus at 1600 Arastradero Road, midway between Page Mill Road and Alpine Road. The site was on a hill overlooking Felt Lake. This area was, and remains, quite rural in nature. Combined with the rather extreme 1960s architecture of the place^[2], this remote setting led to a certain isolation. Some people who worked there reported feeling as if they were already in the future. Unfortunately, the building was damaged during the Loma Prieta earthquake and the university decided to level the site. Today, the site is home to Portola Pastures and is part of the Arastradero Open Space Preserve.

SAIL alumni played a major role in many Silicon Valley firms, becoming founders of now-large firms such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems as well as smaller companies such as Vicarm Inc. (acquired by Unimation), Foonly, Imagen, Xidex, and Valid Logic Systems^[3]. Research accomplishments at SAIL were many, including in the fields of speech recognition and robotics.

SAIL also created the WAITS operating system^[3]. At SAIL, WAITS ran on various models of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 computers, starting with the PDP-6, then the KA10 and KL10. WAITS also ran on Foonly systems at CCRMA and LLL. At one time, the SAIL system was a triple processor KL10/KA10/PDP-6. The SAIL system was shut down in 1991^[3].