Engineering Memory of the Month

Happy birthday, KSL

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a versatile branch of computer science. Although many people associate the field with robots, it also covers applications including “expert systems,” or software programs that, through simulated reasoning and human-supplied expertise, can analyze specialized problems and make suggestions about solutions.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory, a lab that grew out of knowledge-based systems research by pioneering AI researchers Ed Feigenbaum, Kumagai Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, and Bruce Buchanan, now university professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.

The pair collaborated with chemist Carl Djerassi (father of the birth control pill) and Nobel Prize winning biologist Joshua Lederberg to create the first expert system, DENDRAL, in 1965. The system analyzed the mass spectrum of an organic compound, trying to determine its structure. As the work became ever more interdisciplinary, it was renamed the Heuristic Programming Project. It was renamed again in 1982 when researchers Feigenbaum (pictured on the left) and Buchanan (middle), Edward Shortliffe (right), Thomas Rindfleisch (not pictured), and others joined their projects together into the KSL.

CS Professor Emeritus Richard Fikes became the lab’s director in 1999 and last year Senior Research Scientist Deborah McGuiness became the acting director. Current projects at the lab include developing intelligent software assistants for human analysts and contributing enabling technology for the Semantic Web, a concept of the Web in which computers can discover and organize information based on its meaning.

We are interested in your nostalgic photos and the stories they tell. If you’d like to share them with the Stanford Engineering community, e-mail them to David Orenstein, manager, Communications and P.R.