SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center Celebrates 40 Years of Innovation

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- October 16, 2006 -- SRI International is celebrating 40 years of its innovations in artificial intelligence. Since its founding in 1966, when the field was in its infancy, SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center (AIC) has made major contributions to the development and advancement of computational principles underlying machine intelligence.

The Center's innovations have served as a nucleus for long-term projects in all core areas of AI research, including:

• Robotics. From Shakey, the first autonomous mobile robot that could reason about its own surroundings in 1972, to the Centibots, one of the first and largest teams of coordinated robots in 2004, SRI has pioneered advanced robotics demonstrating adaptation to new tasks, team organization, scalability, map building, and fault-tolerant communication.

• Computer Vision. SRI has been advancing techniques for three-dimensional object recognition, location, tracking, and change detection from a range of sensors.  Recent work includes real-time visual odometry from stereo and recognition of people and vehicles from very short video clips taken from unmanned aerial vehicles. 

• Automated Reasoning. SRI researchers have been responsible for major developments in resolution theorem proving and its application to reasoning by abduction in natural-language interpretation, to software synthesis, and more recently, to the composition of web services.

• Planning and Control. SRI pioneered the development of generative planning and reactive planning. It is currently leading the development of integrated human-machine planning and execution monitoring methods based on the advice paradigm.

• Knowledge Acquisition. SRI is developing techniques that allow domain experts to enter into a knowledge base information rich enough to allow a system using it to answer questions as difficult as those found in standard achievement tests, using declarative inference and simulation. 

• Integrated Learning. SRI is leading a group of more than 20 universities and companies in the CALO project, whose objective is to integrate learning with sensing, reasoning and action, and to evaluate it in an intelligent assistant system that learns “in the wild.” At the end of its second year, the CALO system demonstrated significant improvement in its performance due to learning in a test modeled on a standard achievement test.

• Structured Argumentation. SRI has developed and fielded a set of tools allowing intelligence analysts to collaborate on the design of analysis methods, to define complex patterns for searching databases, and to brainstorm solutions.

• Bioinformatics. For drug discovery and research, SRI is building and distributing pathway genome databases for more than 160 organisms, along with development and visualization tools. Novel machine learning algorithms predict the metabolic pathway complement of an organism from its genome. New methods based on rewriting logic are being used for the modeling and analysis of signal transduction and metabolic networks in mammalian cells.

About SRI International
Silicon Valley-based SRI International (www.sri.com) is one of the world’s leading independent research and technology development organizations. Founded as Stanford Research institute in 1946, SRI has been meeting the strategic needs of clients for 60 years. The nonprofit research institute performs contract research and development for government agencies, commercial businesses, and private foundations. In addition to conducting contract R&D, SRI licenses its technologies, forms strategic partnerships, and creates spin-off companies.

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