A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence - The 1980s

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.

1980: McCarthy's Circumscription 1980: John Searle's article "Minds, Brains, and Programs" on the "Chinese Room" that attacks Artificial Intelligence 1980: IntelliGenetics (Intellicorp), the first major start-up for Artificial Intelligence 1981: Automatix introduces the first commercial robot with a vision system 1981: Russell Andersson's robot SCIMR 1981: Danny Hillis' Connection Machine 1981: Hans Kamp`s Discourse Representation Theory 1981: Japan has 14,000 industrial robots versus the USA's 4,200 and West Germany 's 2,300 1981: Andrew Barto's and Richard Sutton's temporal-difference method of reinforcement learning 1982: The Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) research group at UC San Diego 1982: Shunichi Mizuno's cybot New Monroe 1982: Hans Moravec's CMU Rover 1982: Kenneth Salisbury (Stanford) & Jet Propulsion Laboratory's robotic hand 1982: John Hopfield describes a new generation of neural networks, based on recurrence 1982: The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) establishes Artificial Intelligence and Robotics as its very first program 1982: Bart Everett's robot Robart I 1982: Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems project 1982: Teuvo Kohonen's Self-Organized Maps (SOM) for unsupervised learning 1982: Judea Pearl's "Bayesian networks" 1982: David Parker rediscovers backpropagation 1982: Joseph Bosworth's personal robot RB5X 1983: Dainichi Kiko's waiter robot 1983: Scott Kirkpatrick's simulated annealing 1983: Mike Cohen's and Stephen Grossberg's continuous recurrent networks 1983: Yurii Nesterov's accelerated version of gradient descent ("Nesterov momentum") 1983: John Laird and Paul Rosenbloom's SOAR 1983: Geoffrey Hinton's and Terry Sejnowski's Boltzmann machine 1983: Gerard Salton and Michael McGill's "Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval" (the "bag-of-words model") 1983: Odetics' Odex 1984: Tomy's toy Omnibot 2000 1984: Mike Forino's personal robot Hubot 1984: Valentino Braitenberg's "Vehicles" 1984: Robotic hand by Stephen Jacobsen (Univ of Utah) & MIT 1984: Doug Lenat's "Cyc" to catalog common sense 1984: Barbara Hayes-Roth's general-purpose blackboard system BB1 1985: Ichiro Kato's Wasubot performs with a symphony orchestra 1985: Ross Quinlan's ID3 for decision trees analysis 1985: The first international conference on genetic algorithms 1985: Piero Scaruffi opens the A.I. Center at Olivetti, the first major non-academic A.I. Center outside the USA 1985: Yann LeCun rediscovers backpropagation 1985: Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture for robots 1986: Terrence Sejnowski's and Charles Rosenberg's NETtalk 1986: Hinton and Sejnowski organize the first "Connectionist Summer School" at CMU 1986: Jeanny Herault's and Christian Jutten's independent component analysis 1986: David Zipser's "autoencoder" 1986: David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton and Ronald Williams rediscover Werbos' backpropagation algorithm 1986: David Rumelhart's and Jay McClelland's book "Parallel Distributed Processing" 1986: Paul Smolensky's Restricted Boltzmann machine 1986: Barbara Grosz's "Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse" 1987: Hinton moves to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) 1987: Dana Ballard uses unsupervised learning to build representations layer by layer 1987: Chris Langton coins the term "Artificial Life" 1987: Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" 1988: Hilary Putnam: "Has artificial intelligence taught us anything of importance about the mind?" 1988: Toshio Fukuda's self-reconfiguring robot CEBOT 1988: Dean Pomerleau's self-driving vehicle ALVINN 1988: Hans Moravec's book "Mind Children" 1988: Philip Agre builds the first "Heideggerian AI", Pengi, a system that plays the arcade videogame Pengo 1988: Fred Jelinek's team at IBM publishes "A Statistical Approach to Language Translation" 1989: Alex Waibel's "time-delay" neural network 1989: Chris Watkins' Q-learning 1989: Rodney Brooks' six-legged Genghis 1989: Yann LeCun applies backpropagation to convolutional networks for supervised learning. 1989: George Cybenko proves that neural networks can approximate continuous functions 1989: Yann LeCun's convolutional neural network for handwritten-digit recognition (LeNet-1) 1989: Kurt Hornik proves that neural networks are universal approximators