Dr. Dobb's Journal April, 2005
Two decades ago, artificial intelligence was the cat's pajamas. Grant and venture-capital money was flowing like spring run-off, with everything from neural networks and expert systems to fuzzy logic and natural-language processing hailed as national priorities. Lucid alone garnered $25 million to implement its Common LISP. Books were written, companies launched, magazines published—and then, in a preInternet-like bubble burst, it all seemed to go away. After a brief flurry of AI bashing ("AI is neither artificial or intelligent"), it became quickly apparent that the best way to kill a product was to hang an "AI" name on it.
Still, some of the stronger—and presumably smarter—companies not only hung on but prospered by focusing on development tools. Franz Inc. (http://www.franz.com/), for instance, is still going strong with its Allegro suite of LISP-based tools for everything from connectivity and the Web to GUIs and database development. Likewise, Amzi! (http://www.amzi.com/) continues to create Prolog-based tools that support Java, C++, and .NET, and builds custom expert systems. (Note that Amzi!'s Dennis Merritt is also editor of Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter; http://www.ddj.com/maillists/.) At the same time, tools like CLIPS (short for "C Language Integrated Production System"), a development tool for building rule- and object-based expert systems, moved into the public domain and have been widely adopted in industry, government, and academia (http://www.ghg.net/clips/CLIPS.html).
After the bubble burst, AI vendors began focusing on practical, commercial implementations of AI, while avoiding the AI label. Among the current crop of emerging AI-based applications are those that detect credit-card fraud, provide network security, build industrial robots, and help create human-like computer-generated characters for video games and animated movies. For example, a robotic prescription dispensing system from ScriptPro (http://www.scriptpro.com/) fills, labels, and collates up to 150 prescriptions per hour. Upon selection of one prescription, pharmacists are alerted about all prescriptions associated with that patient, thereby saving money and lives.
Then there's Inflow (http://www.inflow.com/), an application that maps the relationships amongst people in organizations. Specifically, the Inflow software measures and graphs the "connectedness" of a group of people, organizations, or both. Links between entities can be recorded in the package for analysis. The resulting cluster graphs provide an intuitive feel for the dynamics of the group.
Travel-planning companies such as Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com/) let you search for the best airfares. What with up to 25 million daily flight combinations and fares updated in real time throughout the day, you can bet that AI techniques like case-based reasoning are at the heart of such systems.
And while some might question its practicality, Sony's Aibo robot dog is clearly an AI application (http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?CategoryName=AIBO&Dept=AIBO). When introduced in 1999, Sony sold 3000 of these "pups" via the Internet in just 20 minutes. Since then, Aibo has gone through at least five versions, with the most recent being wireless enabled. For details on Aibo technology, see Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter, November 2003 (http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=7730/ddj0411ai/ddj0411ai.html#aibo).
That's not to say that AI research has dried up and drifted away. Microsoft for one is doing extensive research in the areas of machine learning, adaptation, and intelligence (http://research.microsoft.com/research/detail.aspx?id=9). On the academic front, even though the famed MIT AI Lab merged last year with the Lab for Computer Science, forming the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (http://www.csail.mit.edu/), it hasn't slowed down a bit. Likewise, serious AI research is ongoing at schools ranging from the University of Alberta (http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ai/) to Iowa State University (http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~honavar/aigroup.html). Additionally, a pair of researchers at the Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute recently snared a $1.2 million DARPA grant to build a system that reads books and answers questions about the text.
In truth, it was Dr. Dobb's AI Expert Newsletter that recently reignited my interest in AI. The original AI Expert, if you recall, was a stellar magazine that began publication in 1986, riding the AI bubble until 1994. Covering all aspects of AI languages, algorithms, tools, and techniques, AI Expert was in many ways the AI-specific equivalent of Dr. Dobb's Journal. Not only did it cover all the right topics, but it had all the right authors—Richard Gabriel, Paul Graham, Maureen Caudill, Rodger Knaus, Kamran Parsaye, the eminent Nick Bourbaki, and many others.
After poring through back issues of the original AI Expert and being reminded what a great magazine it was (Caution! Pitch Ahead), we decided to bring back some of the best articles in a series of e-zines called "The Best of AI Expert." To date, we've compiled three e-zines, with more in the planning stages. You can find out more about this e-zine series at http://shop.sdmediagroup.com/.
Whether these e-zines are an intelligent idea or not remains to be seen. However, there's little question that in the years to come, AI—by whatever name it goes by—will continue to be central to the world of computing.