DARPA
US defense research agency that has funded key AI milestones including early robotics, autonomous vehicles, and natural language research.
9 milestones
IBM TrueNorth: a neuromorphic integrated circuit with one million programmable neurons
In August 2014, researchers at IBM Research published a description of TrueNorth, a neuromorphic chip containing one million programmable spiking neurons and 256 million synapses on a 4096-core CMOS integrated circuit, built under the DARPA SyNAPSE programme.
Schaft Inc Robot Wins DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials 2013
In December 2013, Schaft Inc, a Japanese robotics company acquired by Google in October 2013, won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials at Homestead Miami Speedway, Florida, scoring 27 out of 32 points across eight disaster-response tasks and finishing ahead of 15 other teams.
Apple Releases Siri with iPhone 4S
On 4 October 2011, Apple announced Siri as an integrated feature of the iPhone 4S, making a conversational voice assistant, capable of natural-language queries, task execution, and third-party service calls, available to a mass consumer audience for the first time at that scale.
Stanford Racing Team's Stanley Wins DARPA Grand Challenge 2005
On 8 October 2005, a Stanford University team led by Sebastian Thrun entered Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg, in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Stanley completed the 131.6-mile (211.8 km) Mojave Desert course autonomously in under 7 hours, finishing first and winning the $2 million prize.
DARPA Centibots Project
DARPA funded the Centibots project, a multi-institution effort to demonstrate coordinated autonomous mapping and search using up to 100 mobile robots simultaneously, with results reported from 2003. It addressed whether large teams of robots could self-organise without continuous human supervision.
Second AI Winter
From approximately 1987 to 1993, AI research entered a second sustained contraction as commercial expert-system vendors collapsed, the Lisp machine market failed, and DARPA substantially reduced funding for AI programmes following unmet expectations from the preceding boom.
First AI Winter: Lighthill Report and DARPA Funding Cuts
In 1973, James Lighthill's report for the British Science Research Council assessed artificial intelligence research and found it had failed to meet its goals; the report contributed to substantial funding cuts in the UK and, alongside DARPA reviews in the United States, precipitated the period known as the first AI winter.
MIT Arm: Six-Axis Robotic Manipulator by Victor Scheinman
In 1973, Victor Scheinman at MIT completed the MIT Arm, a six-degree-of-freedom all-revolute robotic manipulator with DARPA funding. Its wrist-intersecting joint geometry simplified kinematic analysis and influenced the design of research and surgical robot arms for decades.
Man-Computer Symbiosis, paper by J. C. R. Licklider
In March 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, then at Bolt Beranek and Newman, published 'Man-Computer Symbiosis' in IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, articulating a vision in which humans and computers would collaborate interactively in real time to solve problems neither could address alone.