Description
The materials consist of SAIL Dump And
Restore Technique (DART) backup files, 1972-1990; digital copies of 16 mm films created from
1963-1980; handbooks; log books; manuals; and photographs and videos from the 35th SAIL
reunion held in 2009.
Background
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (also known as Stanford AI Lab or SAIL) is
the artificial intelligence (AI) research laboratory of Stanford University. It was started
in 1963 by John McCarthy, after he moved from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to
Stanford. From 1965 to 1980, it was housed in the D.C. Power building, in the foothills of
the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Stanford. During this period it was one of the leading
centers for AI research. In 1980, its activities were merged into the university's Computer
Science Department and it moved into Margaret Jacks Hall in the main Stanford campus. SAIL
was reopened in 2004, with Sebastian Thrun becoming its new director. SAIL's 21st century
mission is to "change the way we understand the world"; its researchers contribute to fields
such as bioinformatics, cognition, computational geometry, computer vision, decision theory,
distributed systems, game theory, general game playing, image processing, information
retrieval, knowledge systems, logic, machine learning, multi-agent systems, natural
language, neural networks, planning, probabilistic inference, sensor networks, and
robotics.