 |
|
|
|
A Brief history of ISI and its AI Division
1972
ISI is founded at USC by a group of RAND researchers, starting immediately to administer domain names and IP addresses for the entire Internet and self-assigning "isi.edu"
1981
MOSIS, the first on-line e-commerce system system, opens its VLSI fabrication service that created thousands of unique chips, including those for the chess computer Deep Thought.
1988
ISI pioneers ontology research with the LOOM knowledge representation system and the linguistics-inspired Penman upper model, both still in use and being extended to this day.
1993
SIMS demonstrates effective ontology-mediation techniques to integrate distributed databases, a key technology for today's web information integration systems.
1997
SOAR, a cognitive architecture developed jointly by ISI, CMU and U. Michigan, flies helicopter formations that were indistinguishable to observers from human-controlled aircraft in the Synthetic Theater of War '97 military exercise.
1997
The USC/ISI team wins the middle-sized soccer-playing robots at the First Robot World Cup (RoboCup'97), with the DREAMTEAM on-board processing robots. Formed by a group of students led by Prof Wei-Min Shen, the team retired that year from award-winning competition entries that take away from PhD studies.
1999
The Digital Government Research Center is established with NSF support as a collaboration between ISI and Columbia University. It performs research that aids government agencies that are not traditionally linked to such efforts in information technology. The center launches the annual National (now International) Conference on Digital Government Research, which continues to grow in participation and scope to this day.
1999
Fetch Technologies is founded to commercialize agent-based technologies for information integration developed at ISI. Over the years, Fetch has developed products for rapid integration of on-line information and continues to engage in joint projects with ISI.
2000
Four ISI graduate students launch the Gamebots project as a test-bed to study agents and human team behavior in an Internet-based multi-player video game called Unreal Tournament. Gamebots has been used for graduate research as well as class projects at universities around the world, including Carnegie Mellon University, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Massachusettes, Brigham Young University, University of York and others.
2001
In response to the events of September 11, 2001 and with NSF support, ISI convened a workshop to investigate the use of information technology for emergency response. This activity led to the creation of our Center for Research on Unexpected Events (CRUE).
2002
Language Weaver Inc. begins to commercialize software for machine translation research developed at ISI. The statistically-trained translation software can be customized on the fly by training the system with text that may be domain-specific or proprietary.
2003
ISI's machine translation system is first ever to surpass performance of commercial systems as a research prototype, with novel language learning algorithms.
2005
The Tactical Language Training system trains soldiers to learn Arabic, culture, and missions by immersion in virtual worlds that use cutting edge AI technologies, winning DARPA's 2005 award for Significant Technical Achievement.
2008
ISI's Morpheus team wins the Planetary Robotic Contingency Challenge for configurable robots, where robotic solutions must be quickly developed and deployed to solve a series of unexpected problems occurring at a simulated planetary habitat using only a pre-packed suitcase with existing robotic modules and equipment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
