Timeline of artificial intelligence

This is a timeline of FIXME.

Sample questions

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:

Big picture

Time period	Development summary	More details
1940s	Maturation of artificial intelligence	"Year 1943: The first work which is now recognized as AI was done by Warren McCulloch and Walter pits in 1943. They proposed a model of artificial neurons." "Year 1949: Donald Hebb demonstrated an updating rule for modifying the connection strength between neurons. His rule is now called Hebbian learning." "More recently, in the 1940s, a school of thought called “Connectionism” was developed to study the process of thinking"
1952–1956	"The birth of Artificial Intelligence (1952-1956)"	"Year 1955: An Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon created the "first artificial intelligence program"Which was named as "Logic Theorist". This program had proved 38 of 52 Mathematics theorems, and find new and more elegant proofs for some theorems." "Year 1956: The word "Artificial Intelligence" first adopted by American Computer scientist John McCarthy at the Dartmouth Conference. For the first time, AI coined as an academic field."
1950s		"At the beginning of 1950, John Von Neumann and Alan Turing did not create the term AI but were the founding fathers of the technology behind it: they made the transition from computers to 19th century decimal logic (which thus dealt with values from 0 to 9) and machines to binary logic (which rely on Boolean algebra, dealing with more or less important chains of 0 or 1). The two researchers thus formalized the architecture of our contemporary computers and demonstrated that it was a universal machine, capable of executing what is programmed." " By the 1950s, we had a generation of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers with the concept of artificial intelligence (or AI) culturally assimilated in their minds. One such person was Alan Turing, a young British polymath who explored the mathematical possibility of artificial intelligence. " "Expert systems, as a subset of AI, first emerged in the early 1950s when the Rand-Carnegie team developed the general problem solver to deal with theorems proof, geometric problems and chess playing"
1957–1974		"From 1957 to 1974, AI flourished. Computers could store more information and became faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Machine learning algorithms also improved and people got better at knowing which algorithm to apply to their problem."
1974–1980	AI winter	" After several reports criticizing progress in AI, government funding and interest in the field dropped off – a period from 1974–80 that became known as the "AI winter."" "Artificial Intelligence research funding was cut in the 1970s, after several reports criticized a lack of progress. Efforts to imitate the human brain, called “neural networks,” were experimented with, and dropped. The most impressive, functional programs were only able to handle simplistic problems, and were described as toys by the unimpressed. AI researchers had been overly optimistic in establishing their goals, and had made naive assumptions about the problems they would encounter. When the results they promised never materialized, it should come as no surprise their funding was cut."
1980–1987	"A boom of AI"	" After AI winter duration, AI came back with "Expert System". Expert systems were programmed that emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert." "In the 1980’s, AI was reignited by two sources: an expansion of the algorithmic toolkit, and a boost of funds. John Hopfield and David Rumelhart popularized “deep learning” techniques which allowed computers to learn using experience. On the other hand Edward Feigenbaum introduced expert systems which mimicked the decision making process of a human expert. The program would ask an expert in a field how to respond in a given situation, and once this was learned for virtually every situation, non-experts could receive advice from that program. Expert systems were widely used in industries. The Japanese government heavily funded expert systems and other AI related endeavors as part of their Fifth Generation Computer Project (FGCP). From 1982-1990, they invested $400 million dollars with the goals of revolutionizing computer processing, implementing logic programming, and improving artificial intelligence. " " The field later revived in the 1980s when the British government started funding it again in part to compete with efforts by the Japanese." " AI research resumed in the 1980s, with the U.S. and Britain providing funding to compete with Japan’s new “fifth generation” computer project, and their goal of becoming the world leader in computer technology." "Amid the AI Winter in the United States an epic attempt to realize the ‘AI dream’ was underway in Japan in the form of the Fifth Generation Computer System (FGCS) project during the 1980s."
1987–1993	Second AI winter	"Again Investors and government stopped in funding for AI research as due to high cost but not efficient result. The expert system such as XCON was very cost effective." "The field experienced another major winter from 1987 to 1993, coinciding with the collapse of the market for some of the early general-purpose computers, and reduced government funding." "The AI field experienced another major winter from 1987 to 1993. This second slowdown in AI research coincided with XCON, and other early Expert System computers, being seen as slow and clumsy. Desktop computers were becoming very popular and displacing the older, bulkier, much less user-friendly computer banks. Eventually, Expert Systems simply became too expensive to maintain, when compared to desktops. They were difficult to update, and could not “learn.” These were problems desktop computers did not have. At about the same time, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) concluded AI would not be “the next wave” and redirected its funds to projects deemed more likely to provide quick results. As a consequence, in the late 1980s, funding for AI research was cut deeply, creating the Second AI Winter." However, " By the end of 1980s, over half of the Fortune 500 companies were involved in either developing or maintaining of expert systems"
1993–2011	"The emergence of intelligent agents"	"In the early 1990s, Artificial Intelligence research shifted its focus to something called an intelligent agent. These intelligent agents can be used for news retrieval services, online shopping, and browsing the web. Intelligent agents are also sometimes called agents or bots." "Ironically, in the absence of government funding and public hype, AI thrived. During the 1990s and 2000s, many of the landmark goals of artificial intelligence had been achieved." "However, neural networks would not become financially successful until the 1990s, when they started being used to operate optical character recognition programs and speech pattern recognition programs."
2011-onward	Massive data and new computing power. "Deep learning, big data and artificial general intelligence"	"In the year 2011, IBM's Watson won jeopardy, a quiz show, where it had to solve the complex questions as well as riddles. Watson had proved that it could understand natural language and can solve tricky questions quickly." "Two factors explain the new boom in the discipline around 2010. 1) First of all, access to massive volumes of data. To be able to use algorithms for image classification and cat recognition, for example, it was previously necessary to carry out sampling yourself. Today, a simple search on Google can find millions. 2) Then the discovery of the very high efficiency of computer graphics card processors to accelerate the calculation of learning algorithms. The process being very iterative, it could take weeks before 2010 to process the entire sample. The computing power of these cards (capable of more than a thousand billion transactions per second) has enabled considerable progress at a limited financial cost (less than 1000 euros per card)."

Full timeline

Year	Event type	Details	Country/location
1308		" Catalan poet and theologian Ramon Llull publishes Ars generalis ultima (The Ultimate General Art), further perfecting his method of using paper-based mechanical means to create new knowledge from combinations of concepts."
1666		"Mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz publishes Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (On the Combinatorial Art), following Ramon Llull in proposing an alphabet of human thought and arguing that all ideas are nothing but combinations of a relatively small number of simple concepts."
1726		"onathan Swift publishes Gulliver's Travels, which includes a description of the Engine, a machine on the island of Laputa (and a parody of Llull's ideas): "a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations." By using this "Contrivance," "the most ignorant Person at a reasonable Charge, and with a little bodily Labour, may write Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks, and Theology, with the least Assistance from Genius or study.""
1763		"Thomas Bayes develops a framework for reasoning about the probability of events. Bayesian inference will become a leading approach in machine learning."
1854		" George Boole argues that logical reasoning could be performed systematically in the same manner as solving a system of equations."
1898		"At an electrical exhibition in the recently completed Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla makes a demonstration of the world’s first radio-controlled vessel. The boat was equipped with, as Tesla described, “a borrowed mind.”"
1914		"The Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres y Quevedo demonstrates the first chess-playing machine, capable of king and rook against king endgames without any human intervention."
1921		"Czech writer Karel Čapek introduces the word "robot" in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The word "robot" comes from the word "robota" (work)."
1925		" Houdina Radio Control releases a radio-controlled driverless car, travelling the streets of New York City."
1927		"he science-fiction film Metropolis is released. It features a robot double of a peasant girl, Maria, which unleashes chaos in Berlin of 2026—it was the first robot depicted on film, inspiring the Art Deco look of C-3PO in Star Wars."
1929		"Makoto Nishimura designs Gakutensoku, Japanese for "learning from the laws of nature," the first robot built in Japan. It could change its facial expression and move its head and hands via an air pressure mechanism."
1943		"Warren S. McCulloch and Walter Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics. This influential paper, in which they discussed networks of idealized and simplified artificial “neurons” and how they might perform simple logical functions, will become the inspiration for computer-based “neural networks” (and later “deep learning”) and their popular description as “mimicking the brain.”" "a first mathematical and computer model of the biological neuron (formal neuron) had been developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts as early as 1943." "The first work which is now recognized as AI was done by Warren McCulloch and Walter pits in 1943. They proposed a model of artificial neurons."
1949		" Edmund Berkeley publishes Giant Brains: Or Machines That Think in which he writes: “Recently there have been a good deal of news about strange giant machines that can handle information with vast speed and skill….These machines are similar to what a brain would be if it were made of hardware and wire instead of flesh and nerves… A machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.”"
1949		"Donald Hebb publishes Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory in which he proposes a theory about learning based on conjectures regarding neural networks and the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time." "Donald Hebb demonstrated an updating rule for modifying the connection strength between neurons. His rule is now called Hebbian learning."
1950		" Claude Shannon’s “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” is the first published article on developing a chess-playing computer program."
1950		" Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in which he proposes “the imitation game” which will later become known as the “Turing Test.”"
1950		". Turing, on the other hand, raised the question of the possible intelligence of a machine for the first time in his famous 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and described a "game of imitation", where a human should be able to distinguish in a teletype dialogue whether he is talking to a man or a machine."
1951		" Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmunds build SNARC (Stochastic Neural Analog Reinforcement Calculator), the first artificial neural network, using 3000 vacuum tubes to simulate a network of 40 neurons."
1952		" Arthur Samuel develops the first computer checkers-playing program and the first computer program to learn on its own."
1952		"Hodgkin-Huxley model of the brain as neurons forming an electrical network, with individual neurons firing in all-or-nothing (on/off) pulses."
1954		"In the US, one of the main motivations for the funding of AI research was the promise of machine translation (MT). Because of Cold War concerns, the US government was particularly interested in the automatic and instant translation of Russian. In 1954, the first demonstration of MT, the Georgetown-IBM experiment, showed a great promise. The system was by no means complete, consisting only six rules, a 250-item vocabulary and specialized only in Organic Chemistry."
1955		"August 31, 1955 The term “artificial intelligence” is coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). The workshop, which took place a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally considered as the official birthdate of the new field."
1955		"December 1955 Herbert Simon and Allen Newell develop the Logic Theorist, the first artificial intelligence program, which eventually would prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica." " An Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon created the "first artificial intelligence program"Which was named as "Logic Theorist". This program had proved 38 of 52 Mathematics theorems, and find new and more elegant proofs for some theorems."
1956		"August 31, 1955 The term “artificial intelligence” is coined in a proposal for a “2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence” submitted by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories). The workshop, which took place a year later, in July and August 1956, is generally considered as the official birthdate of the new field."" "The summer 1956 conference at Dartmouth College (funded by the Rockefeller Institute) is considered the founder of the discipline. Anecdotally, it is worth noting the great success of what was not a conference but rather a workshop. Only six people, including McCarthy and Minsky, had remained consistently present throughout this work (which relied essentially on developments based on formal logic)."
1956		"Five years later, the proof of concept was initialized through Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert Simon’s, Logic Theorist. The Logic Theorist was a program designed to mimic the problem solving skills of a human and was funded by Research and Development (RAND) Corporation. It’s considered by many to be the first artificial intelligence program and was presented at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (DSRPAI) hosted by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky in 1956." "But the field of AI wasn't formally founded until 1956, at a conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the term "artificial intelligence" was coined."
1957		" Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network enabling pattern recognition based on a two-layer computer learning network. The New York Times reported the Perceptron to be "the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence." The New Yorker called it a “remarkable machine… capable of what amounts to thought.”"
1957		"Herbert Simon, economist and sociologist, prophesied in 1957 that the AI would succeed in beating a human at chess in the next 10 years, but the AI then entered a first winter. Simon's vision proved to be right... 30 years later."
1958		"John McCarthy develops programming language Lisp which becomes the most popular programming language used in artificial intelligence research."
1959		"Arthur Samuel coins the term “machine learning,” reporting on programming a computer “so that it will learn to play a better game of checkers than can be played by the person who wrote the program.”"
1959		"Oliver Selfridge publishes “Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes a model for a process by which computers could recognize patterns that have not been specified in advance."
1959		"John McCarthy publishes “Programs with Common Sense” in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, in which he describes the Advice Taker, a program for solving problems by manipulating sentences in formal languages with the ultimate objective of making programs “that learn from their experience as effectively as humans do.”"
1961		"The first industrial robot, Unimate, starts working on an assembly line in a General Motors plant in New Jersey."
1961		"James Slagle develops SAINT (Symbolic Automatic INTegrator), a heuristic program that solved symbolic integration problems in freshman calculus."
1963		" 1963 article by Reed C. Lawlor, a member of the California Bar, entitled "What Computers Can Do: Analysis and Prediction of Judicial Decisions""
1964		"Daniel Bobrow completes his MIT PhD dissertation titled “Natural Language Input for a Computer Problem Solving System” and develops STUDENT, a natural language understanding computer program."
1964		Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour	United Kingdom
1965		"Herbert Simon predicts that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.""
1965		"Hubert Dreyfus publishes "Alchemy and AI," arguing that the mind is not like a computer and that there were limits beyond which AI would not progress."
1965		"I.J. Good writes in "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" that “the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”"
1965		" Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA, an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in English language on any topic. Weizenbaum, who wanted to demonstrate the superficiality of communication between man and machine, was surprised by the number of people who attributed human-like feelings to the computer program."
1965		"Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi start working on DENDRAL at Stanford University. The first expert system, it automated the decision-making process and problem-solving behavior of organic chemists, with the general aim of studying hypothesis formation and constructing models of empirical induction in science."
1965	Expert system	"The path was actually opened at MIT in 1965 with DENDRAL (expert system specialized in molecular chemistry) "
1966		"Shakey the robot is the first general-purpose mobile robot to be able to reason about its own actions. In a Life magazine 1970 article about this “first electronic person,” Marvin Minsky is quoted saying with “certitude”: “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.”"
1966		"1966: Birth of the first chatbot The German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invents a computer program that communicates with humans. ‘ELIZA’ uses scripts to simulate various conversation partners such as a psychotherapist. Weizenbaum is surprised at the simplicity of the means required for ELIZA to create the illusion of a human conversation partner." " The researchers emphasized developing algorithms which can solve mathematical problems. Joseph Weizenbaum created the first chatbot in 1966, which was named as ELIZA."
1966		"The onset of the AI winter could be traced to the government’s decision to pull back on AI research. The decisions were often attributed to a couple of infamous reports, specifically the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report by U.S. Government in 1966, and the Lighthill report for the British government in 1973." ||
1966		Artificial Intelligence Center
1968		"The film 2001: Space Odyssey is released, featuring Hal, a sentient computer." "In 1968 Stanley Kubrick directed the film "2001 Space Odyssey" where a computer - HAL 9000 (only one letter away from those of IBM) summarizes in itself the whole sum of ethical questions posed by AI: will it represent a high level of sophistication, a good for humanity or a danger? The impact of the film will naturally not be scientific but it will contribute to popularize the theme, just as the science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who will never cease to wonder if, one day, the machines will experience emotions."
1968		"Terry Winograd develops SHRDLU, an early natural language understanding computer program."
1969		"Arthur Bryson and Yu-Chi Ho describe backpropagation as a multi-stage dynamic system optimization method. A learning algorithm for multi-layer artificial neural networks, it has contributed significantly to the success of deep learning in the 2000s and 2010s, once computing power has sufficiently advanced to accommodate the training of large networks."
1969		"Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry, highlighting the limitations of simple neural networks. In an expanded edition published in 1988, they responded to claims that their 1969 conclusions significantly reduced funding for neural network research: “Our version is that progress had already come to a virtual halt because of the lack of adequate basic theories… by the mid-1960s there had been a great many experiments with perceptrons, but no one had been able to explain why they were able to recognize certain kinds of patterns and not others.”"
1970		"It was with the advent of the first microprocessors at the end of 1970 that AI took off again and entered the golden age of expert systems."
1970		"The first anthropomorphic robot, the WABOT-1, is built at Waseda University in Japan. It consisted of a limb-control system, a vision system and a conversation system."
1970		" In 1970 Marvin Minsky told Life Magazine, “from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” However, while the basic proof of principle was there, there was still a long way to go before the end goals of natural language processing, abstract thinking, and self-recognition could be achieved."
1972	Expert system	"MYCIN, an early expert system for identifying bacteria causing severe infections and recommending antibiotics, is developed at Stanford University." "Stanford University in 1972 with MYCIN (system specialized in the diagnosis of blood diseases and prescription drugs). " "1972: AI enters the medical field. With ‘MYCIN’, artificial intelligence finds its way into medical practices: The expert system developed by Ted Shortliffe at Stanford University is used for the treatment of illnesses. Expert systems are computer programs that bundle the knowledge for a specialist field using formulas, rules, and a knowledge database. They are used for diagnosis and treatment support in medicine."
1972		"The first intelligent humanoid robot was built in Japan which was named as WABOT-1."
1973		"James Lighthill reports to the British Science Research Council on the state artificial intelligence research, concluding that "in no part of the field have discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised," leading to drastically reduced government support for AI research." "The “Lighthill report” commonly refers to “Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey” by Professor Sir James Lighthill of Cambridge University in 1973. His review of AI was at the request of Brian Flowers, the head of the British Science Research Council, the main funding body of British university scientific research. The review was to help the council evaluate requests for support in AI research. In the paper, Lighthill offered a pessimistic prognosis for AI, stating that “in no part of the field have discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised”"
1973		"The onset of the AI winter could be traced to the government’s decision to pull back on AI research. The decisions were often attributed to a couple of infamous reports, specifically the Automatic Language Processing Advisory Committee (ALPAC) report by U.S. Government in 1966, and the Lighthill report for the British government in 1973."
1976		"Computer scientist Raj Reddy publishes “Speech Recognition by Machine: A Review” in the Proceedings of the IEEE, summarizing the early work on Natural Language Processing (NLP)."
1977		iLabs	Italy
1978	Expert system	"The XCON (eXpert CONfigurer) program, a rule-based expert system assisting in the ordering of DEC's VAX computers by automatically selecting the components based on the customer's requirements, is developed at Carnegie Mellon University."
1978		". In 1978 Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) commissioned a study of what the future would hold for computers, and three years later attempted to construct fifth generation computers – creating what project heads described as an ‘epochal’ leap in computer technology, in order to give Japan the technological lead for years to come. This new generation of machines would not be built on standard microprocessors, but multiprocessor machines specializing in logic programming. The bet was that these high-power logic machines would catalyze the world of information processing and realize artificial intelligence." ||
1979		"The Stanford Cart successfully crosses a chair-filled room without human intervention in about five hours, becoming one of the earliest examples of an autonomous vehicle."
1979		Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence	United States
1980	Expert system	" After AI winter duration, AI came back with "Expert System". Expert systems were programmed that emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert."
1980		"Wabot-2 is built at Waseda University in Japan, a musician humanoid robot able to communicate with a person, read a musical score and play tunes of average difficulty on an electronic organ."
1980	Expert system	"Digital Equipment Corporation began requiring their sales team use an Expert System named XCON when placing customer orders. DEC sold a broad range of computer components, but the sales force was not especially knowledgeable about what they were selling."
1980		"In the Year 1980, the first national conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence was held at Stanford University."
1980		"The year of AI. In 1980, AI research fired back up with an expansion of funds and algorithmic tools. With deep learning techniques, the computer learned with the user experience."
1981		"he Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry budgets $850 million for the Fifth Generation Computer project. The project aimed to develop computers that could carry on conversations, translate languages, interpret pictures, and reason like human beings"
1981		"Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) commissioned a study of what the future would hold for computers, and three years later attempted to construct fifth generation computers – creating what project heads described as an ‘epochal’ leap in computer technology, in order to give Japan the technological lead for years to come. This new generation of machines would not be built on standard microprocessors, but multiprocessor machines specializing in logic programming. The bet was that these high-power logic machines would catalyze the world of information processing and realize artificial intelligence."	Japan
1982		European Association for Artificial Intelligence
1983		Turing Institute	United Kingdom
1984		"Electric Dreams is released, a film about a love triangle between a man, a woman and a personal computer."
1984		"At the annual meeting of AAAI, Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky warn of the coming “AI Winter,” predicting an immanent bursting of the AI bubble (which did happen three years later), similar to the reduction in AI investment and research funding in the mid-1970s."
1986		"First driverless car, a Mercedes-Benz van equipped with cameras and sensors, built at Bundeswehr University in Munich under the direction of Ernst Dickmanns, drives up to 55 mph on empty streets."
1986		Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics	India
1986		"October 1986 David Rumelhart, Geoffrey Hinton, and Ronald Williams publish ”Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” in which they describe “a new learning procedure, back-propagation, for networks of neurone-like units.”"
1986		"1986: ‘NETtalk’ speaks. The computer is given a voice for the first time. Terrence J. Sejnowski and Charles Rosenberg teach their ‘NETtalk’ program to speak by inputting sample sentences and phoneme chains. NETtalk is able to read words and pronounce them correctly, and can apply what it has learned to words it does not know. It is one of the early artificial neural networks — programs that are supplied with large datasets and are able to draw their own conclusions on this basis. Their structure and function are thereby similar to those of the human brain."
1987		"The video Knowledge Navigator, accompanying Apple CEO John Sculley’s keynote speech at Educom, envisions a future in which “knowledge applications would be accessed by smart agents working over networks connected to massive amounts of digitized information.”"
1988		"Judea Pearl publishes Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems. His 2011 Turing Award citation reads: “Judea Pearl created the representational and computational foundation for the processing of information under uncertainty. He is credited with the invention of Bayesian networks, a mathematical formalism for defining complex probability models, as well as the principal algorithms used for inference in these models. This work not only revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence but also became an important tool for many other branches of engineering and the natural sciences.”"
1988		Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research	Switzerland
1988		"Rollo Carpenter develops the chat-bot Jabberwacky to "simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner." It is an early attempt at creating artificial intelligence through human interaction."
1988		"Members of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center publish “A statistical approach to language translation,” heralding the shift from rule-based to probabilistic methods of machine translation, and reflecting a broader shift to “machine learning” based on statistical analysis of known examples, not comprehension and “understanding” of the task at hand (IBM’s project Candide, successfully translating between English and French, was based on 2.2 million pairs of sentences, mostly from the bilingual proceedings of the Canadian parliament)."
1988		German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence	Germany
1989		"Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert publish an expanded edition of their 1969 book Perceptrons. In “Prologue: A View from 1988” they wrote: “One reason why progress has been so slow in this field is that researchers unfamiliar with its history have continued to make many of the same mistakes that others have made before them.”"
1989		"Yann LeCun and other researchers at AT&T Bell Labs successfully apply a backpropagation algorithm to a multi-layer neural network, recognizing handwritten ZIP codes. Given the hardware limitations at the time, it took about 3 days (still a significant improvement over earlier efforts) to train the network."
1990		"Rodney Brooks publishes “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” proposing a new approach to AI—building intelligent systems, specifically robots, from the ground up and on the basis of ongoing physical interaction with the environment: “The world is its own best model… The trick is to sense it appropriately and often enough.”"
1991		European Neural Network Society
1993		"Vernor Vinge publishes “The Coming Technological Singularity,” in which he predicts that “within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”"
1995		"Richard Wallace develops the chatbot A.L.I.C.E (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity), inspired by Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program, but with the addition of natural language sample data collection on an unprecedented scale, enabled by the advent of the Web."
1997		"Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber propose Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), a type of a recurrent neural network used today in handwriting recognition and speech recognition."
1997		". In 1997, reigning world chess champion and grand master Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, a chess playing computer program. This highly publicized match was the first time a reigning world chess champion loss to a computer and served as a huge step towards an artificially intelligent decision making program." "Deep Blue becomes the first computer chess-playing program to beat a reigning world chess champion."
1997		" speech recognition software, developed by Dragon Systems, was implemented on Windows. This was another great step forward but in the direction of the spoken language interpretation endeavor."
1998		"Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung create Furby, the first domestic or pet robot."
1998		"Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and others publish papers on the application of neural networks to handwriting recognition and on optimizing backpropagation."
2000		"MIT’s Cynthia Breazeal develops Kismet, a robot that could recognize and simulate emotions."
2000		"Honda's ASIMO robot, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot, is able to walk as fast as a human, delivering trays to customers in a restaurant setting."
2001		"A.I. Artificial Intelligence is released, a Steven Spielberg film about David, a childlike android uniquely programmed with the ability to love."
2001		Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute	United States
2002		"Year 2002: for the first time, AI entered the home in the form of Roomba, a vacuum cleaner."
2003		"In 2003, Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto), Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal) and Yann LeCun (University of New York) decided to start a research program to bring neural networks up to date. Experiments conducted simultaneously at Microsoft, Google and IBM with the help of the Toronto laboratory in Hinton showed that this type of learning succeeded in halving the error rates for speech recognition. Similar results were achieved by Hinton's image recognition team."
2003		MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory	United States
2004		"The first DARPA Grand Challenge, a prize competition for autonomous vehicles, is held in the Mojave Desert. None of the autonomous vehicles finished the 150-mile route."
2006		"Oren Etzioni, Michele Banko, and Michael Cafarella coin the term “machine reading,” defining it as an inherently unsupervised “autonomous understanding of text.”"
2006		"Geoffrey Hinton publishes “Learning Multiple Layers of Representation,” summarizing the ideas that have led to “multilayer neural networks that contain top-down connections and training them to generate sensory data rather than to classify it,” i.e., the new approaches to deep learning."
2006		"Year 2006: AI came in the Business world till the year 2006. Companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix also started using AI."
2006		The first AI doctor-conducted unassisted robotic surgery is on a 34-year-old male to correct heart arrythmia. The results are rated as better than an above-average human surgeon. The machine has a database of 10,000 similar operations, and so, in the words of its designers, is "more than qualified to operate on any patient".
2007		"Fei Fei Li and colleagues at Princeton University start to assemble ImageNet, a large database of annotated images designed to aid in visual object recognition software research."
2008		Eliezer Yudkowsky calls for the creation of “friendly AI” to mitigate existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence. Yudkowsky explains: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."	United States
2009		"Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan and Andrew Ng publish “Large-scale Deep Unsupervised Learning using Graphics Processors,” arguing that “modern graphics processors far surpass the computational capabilities of multicore CPUs, and have the potential to revolutionize the applicability of deep unsupervised learning methods.”"
2009		"Google starts developing, in secret, a driverless car. In 2014, it became the first to pass, in Nevada, a U.S. state self-driving test."
2009		"Computer scientists at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University develop Stats Monkey, a program that writes sport news stories without human intervention."
2010		"Launch of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVCR), an annual AI object recognition competition."
2010		DeepMind
2011		"A convolutional neural network wins the German Traffic Sign Recognition competition with 99.46% accuracy (vs. humans at 99.22%)."
2011		"And in 2011, the computer giant's question-answering system Watson won the quiz show "Jeopardy!" by beating reigning champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings."
2011		"This year, the talking computer "chatbot" Eugene Goostman captured headlines for tricking judges into thinking he was real skin-and-blood human during a Turing test,"
2011		"Watson, a natural language question answering computer, competes on Jeopardy! and defeats two former champions."
2011		"Researchers at the IDSIA in Switzerland report a 0.27% error rate in handwriting recognition using convolutional neural networks, a significant improvement over the 0.35%-0.40% error rate in previous years."
2011		"2011: AI enters everyday life. Technology leaps in the hardware and software fields pave the way for artificial intelligence to enter everyday life. Powerful processors and graphics cards in computers, smartphones, and tablets give regular consumers access to AI programs. Digital assistants in particular enjoy great popularity: Apple’s ‘Siri’ comes to the market in 2011, Microsoft introduces the ‘Cortana’ software in 2014, and Amazon presents Amazon Echo with the voice service ‘Alexa’ in 2015."
2012		"June 2012 Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng report on an experiment in which they showed a very large neural network 10 million unlabeled images randomly taken from YouTube videos, and “to our amusement, one of our artificial neurons learned to respond strongly to pictures of... cats.”"
2012		"October 2012 A convolutional neural network designed by researchers at the University of Toronto achieve an error rate of only 16% in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, a significant improvement over the 25% error rate achieved by the best entry the year before."
2014		"Google starts developing, in secret, a driverless car. In 2014, it became the first to pass, in Nevada, a U.S. state self-driving test."
2014		Allen Institute for AI	United States
2014		"Microsoft introduces the ‘Cortana’ software"
2014		Future of Life Institute	United States
2014		Squirrel AI	China
2014		Kiev Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence	Ukraine
2015		"Amazon introduces service ‘Alexa’ in 2015."
2016		"March 2016 Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champion Lee Sedol."
2016		Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence	United States
2016		Partnership on AI
2016		Active Intelligence Pte Ltd	Singapore
2017		OpenAI Five	United States
2017		DeepMind releases AI Safety Gridworlds, which evaluate AI algorithms on nine safety features, such as whether the algorithm wants to turn off its own kill switch. DeepMind confirms that existing algorithms perform poorly, which is "unsurprising" because the algorithms "are not designed to solve these problems"; solving such problems might require "potentially building a new generation of algorithms with safety considerations at their core".
2017		Asilomar Conference on Beneficial AI
2018		"2018: AI debates space travel and makes a hairdressing appointment. These two examples demonstrate the capabilities of artificial intelligence: In June, ‘Project Debater’ from IBM debated complex topics with two master debaters — and performed remarkably well. A few weeks before, Google demonstrated at a conference how the AI program ‘Duplex’ phones a hairdresser and conversationally makes an appointment — without the lady on the other end of the line noticing that she is talking to a machine."
2018		European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
2018		Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence	Netherlands
2019		Center for Security and Emerging Technology	United States
2019		Google AI Centre in Ghana	Ghana

Meta information on the timeline

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The initial version of the timeline was written by FIXME.

Funding information for this timeline is available.

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• Category:Artificial intelligence applications
• Category:Artificial intelligence associations
• Category:Artificial intelligence laboratories
• Category:Artificial intelligence conferences
• Category:Artificial intelligence publications
• Category:Existential risk from artificial general intelligence
• Category:History of artificial intelligence
• Category:Philosophy of artificial intelligence

See also

• Timeline of machine learning
• Timeline of robotics