Textbook of AI

The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) was founded by John McCarthy in 1963, after his departure from MIT, becoming with the MIT AI Lab one of the two pre-eminent institutional homes of early American AI research. McCarthy had coined the term artificial intelligence for the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and brought to Stanford the same combination of logical foundations, ambitious systems-building and deep-bench computer-science culture that he had cultivated at MIT.

Location and culture

SAIL was housed initially in the D. C. Power Laboratory in the foothills above the Stanford campus, popularly known as the "AI Lab on the hill". The building had a panoramic view of the Bay Area and a famously eccentric culture: a sauna, a vending machine for ice cream, model trains, a beanbag-and-cushion lounge ("the Prancing Pony"), and round-the-clock hacking on a PDP-6 and later a PDP-10 running the WAITS operating system (the Stanford counterpart to MIT's ITS). The lab was a magnet for the early hacker culture documented in Steven Levy's Hackers (1984). It moved into the main Computer Science Department building (Margaret Jacks Hall) in 1980 and was reconstituted in 2004 as a cross-departmental research institute focused on contemporary AI; it remains one of the world's leading AI labs.

Productions

SAIL's research output across its first three decades includes:

• Expert systems: DENDRAL (with Feigenbaum, Buchanan and Lederberg, from 1965), molecular-structure inference from mass spectra, the first major expert system; MYCIN (Shortliffe, 1972), antibiotic recommendation, with its rule-based architecture and certainty factors.
• Robotics: the Stanford Cart (Moravec, 1977–1980), an early autonomous mobile robot navigating obstacle courses by stereo vision; the Stanford Hand-Eye Project of the late 1960s; the Stanford Arm (Scheinman, 1969) which influenced industrial-robot design for decades.
• Game playing: Mac Hack VI ports and the Greenblatt-derived chess programs; later Deep Blue ancestors.
• Knowledge representation and reasoning: MICROPLANNER, AM and Eurisko (Lenat); knowledge-base projects that fed into CYC.
• Computer graphics: a tradition that fed directly into Pixar (Ed Catmull and others). The Lucasfilm Computer Division and Pixar are partly Stanford progeny.
• Natural language: SHRDLU was MIT, but Stanford produced the Roger Schank group's conceptual-dependency systems and, much later, Chris Manning's group's foundational work in statistical and neural NLP.
• Autonomous vehicles: Stanley (2005) and Junior (2007), winning the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges.

People

Faculty and alumni include John McCarthy, Edward Feigenbaum, Nils Nilsson (visiting from SRI), Donald Knuth, Terry Winograd, Doug Lenat, Sebastian Thrun, Daphne Koller, Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, Chris Manning, Percy Liang and many others. SAIL alumni founded or co-founded Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Google (in part), Coursera, dozens of AV companies, and a substantial fraction of the modern AI industry.

Modern relevance

SAIL was the institutional home of ImageNet (Fei-Fei Li, 2009), whose ILSVRC competition catalysed the deep-learning revolution; of the Stanford NLP Group that produced GloVe, CoreNLP, Stanza, and key contributions to the Transformer era; and of HAI (the Human-Centered AI Institute, 2019) co-led by Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy. Stanford's alumni networks are arguably the most influential single-institution lineage in AI history, alongside CMU and the University of Toronto.