Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (Al) is the key technology in many of today's novel applications, ranging from banking systems that detect attempted credit card fraud, to telephone systems that understand speech, to software systems that notice when you're having problems and offer appropriate advice. These technologies would not exist today without the sustained federal support of fundamental Al research over the past three decades.

Although there are some fairly pure applications of Al-such as industrial robots, or the INTELLIPATH (available at zelda.thomson.com/ chaphall/medelec.html) pathology diagnosis system recently approved by the American Medical Association and deployed in hundreds of hospitals worldwide-for the most part, AI does not produce stand-alone systems, but instead adds knowledge and reasoning to existing applications, databases, and environments, to make them friendlier, smarter, and more sensitive to user behavior and changes in their environments. The Al portion of an application (e.g., a logical inference or learning module) is generally a large system, dependent on a substantial infrastructure. Industrial R&D, with its relatively short time-horizons, could not have justified work of the type and scale that has been required to build the foundation for the civilian and military successes that Al enjoys today. And beyond the myriad of currently deployed applications, ongoing efforts that draw upon these decades of federallysponsored fundamental research point towards even more impressive future capabilities:

Autonomous vehicles: A DARPA-funded onboard computer system (www.cs.cmu.edu/ -pomerlea/nhaa.html) from Carnegie Mellon University drove a van all but 52 of the 2849 miles from Washington, DC to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour day and night, rain or shine.

Computer chess: Deep Blue (www. research.ibm.com/research/systems.html#chess, a chess computer built by IBM researchers, defeated world champion Gary Kasparov in a landmark performance.

Mathematical theorem proving: A computer system at Argonne National Laboratories (www.mcs.anl.gov/home/mccune/ar/ robbins/) proved a long-standing mathematical conjecture about algebra using a method that would be considered creative if done by humans.

Scientific classification: A NASA system learned to classify very faint signals as either stars or galaxies with superhuman accuracy, by studying examples classified by experts.

Advanced user interfaces: PEGASUS (slswww.lcs.mit.edu/PEGASUS.html) is a spoken language interface connected to the American Airlines EAASY SABRE reservation system, which allows subscribers to obtain flight information and make flight reservations via a large, online, dynamic database, accessed through...