A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence - The 1970s

Click here for the other decades | An appendix to the Bibliography on Mind
All of these events are explained in my book "Intelligence is not Artificial".

Slide presentation "AI and the Singularity"

TM, ®, Copyright © 1996-2017 Piero Scaruffi except pictures. All rights reserved.

1970: Albert Uttley's Informon for adaptive pattern recognition 1970: Hitachi demonstrates a robot that can build objects based on drawings 1970: Tom Martin founds Threshold Technology, the first commercial company for speech recognition 1970: Masakazu Ejiri of Hitachi develops a robot that incorporates machine vision, the Hivip Mk1 1970: William Woods' Augmented Transition Network (ATN) for natural language processing 1971: The "Stanford cart" autonomous outdoors vehicle 1971: Atsuo Takanishi's WL-5 (1971) and WL-10R (1983) 1971: Richard Fikes' and Nils Nilsson's STRIPS planner 1971: Noam Chomsky's article against Burrhus Skinner's behaviorism 1971: Ingo Rechenberg publishes his thesis "Evolution Strategies", a set of optimization methods for evolutionary computation 1971: University of Edinburgh's robot Freddy 1972: Alain Colmerauer's PROLOG programming language 1972: The first chatbot to chatbot conversation ever takes place over the Arpanet between Kenneth Colby's chatbot Parry at Stanford and Eliza at MIT 1972: Richard Karp shows there are many problems that can probably only be solved in exponential time 1972: Harry Klopf's "Brain Function and Adaptive Systems" 1972: William Woods' question-answering system LUNAR 1972: The SIRCH robotic arm at Nottingham University 1972: Bruce Buchanan's MYCIN 1972: Terry Winograd's Shrdlu 1972: Shigeo Hirose's snake-robot ACM III 1972: Petternella-Salinari hexapod robot 1973: "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey" by James Lighthill criticizes Artificial Intelligence for over-promising 1973: Ichiro Kato's Wabot, the first real-size anthropomorphic walking robot 1973: Antal Bejczy's JPL Rover 1973: Jim Baker applies the Hidden Markov Model to speech recognition ("Machine-aided Labeling of Connected Speech") 1974: Marvin Minsky's frame 1974: Paul Werbos' backpropagation algorithm for neural networks 1975: Roger Schank's script 1975: Ben Skora's robot Arok 1975: Raj Reddy's team at Carnegie Mellon University develops three speech-recognition systems (Bruce Lowerre's Harpy, Hearsay-II and Jim Baker's Dragon) 1975: Hearsay-II's blackboard model by Rick Hayes-Roth, Lee Erman, Victor Lesser and Richard Fennell 1975: The first Artificial Intelligence in Medicine workshop at Rutgers University 1975: John Holland's genetic algorithms 1976: Richard Laing's paradigm of self-replication by self-inspection 1976: Stephen Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) for unsupervised learning 1976: Fred Jelinek's "Continuous Speech Recognition by Statistical Methods" 1976: Shigeo Hirose's Kumo-I (1976) and PV-II (1978) 1976: Masha hexapod 1977: Robert McGhee's Bionic Bug 1977: Georges Giralt's Hilare robot in France 1977: General Motors' computer-vision system Sight-I 1977: Ian Witten's actor-critic method 1977: David Marr's and Tomaso Poggio's "2 1/2 sketch" 1978: John McDermott's expert system R1/XCON 1978: Shunichi Amari publishes neural field equations 1978: Ryszard Michalski builds the first practical system that learns from examples, AQ11 1978: Lothar Rossol organizes at General Motors a symposium on computer vision 1979: Johan DeKleer's qualitative reasoning 1979: A factory worker named Robert Williams is the first human killed by a robot 1979: General Motors' Consight robot 1979: Tokuji Okada's robotic hand with three fingers 1979: William Clancey's Guidon 1979: Hans Berliner's BKG 9.8 at Carnegie-Mellon University (connected by satellite to the robot Gammonoid) beats the world champion of backgammon in Monte Carlo 1979: Drew McDermott's non-monotonic logic 1979: Kunihiko Fukushima's convolutional neural network ("Neocognitron - A Self-organizing Neural Network Model for a Mechanism of Pattern Recognition Unaffected by Shift in Position")