Thomas Haigh

Jan 6, 2025 | cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh |Ted Selker |Mark Halper |Robin Hill

In the first four parts of this Communications Historical Reflections column series, I have followed the artificial intelligence (AI) brand from its debut in the 1950s through to the reorientation of the field around probabilistic approaches and big data during the AI winter that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. Aside from the brief flourishing of an expert system industry in the 1980s, the main theme of that long history was disappointment.

Oct 8, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh |Sam Greengard |Alex Williams |Logan Kugler

Observing the tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) hype that has swept over the world in the past few years, science fiction writer Ted Chiang staked out a contrarian position. “Artificial intelligence,” he insisted, was just a “poor choice of words … back in the ’50s” that had caused “a lot of confusion.” Under the rubric of intelligence, verbs such as “learn,” “understand,” and “know” had been misappropriated to imply sentience where none existed.

Jan 25, 2024 | cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh

View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryIn the Digital EditionShare:In my last two columns (June 2023 and December 2023) I followed the history of artificial intelligence (AI) as an intellectual brand and sub-field of computer science, from its creation in 1955 through to the end of the 1970s. While acknowledging that AI faced high-profile skepticism from the mid-1960s onward, I argued the 1970s were a time of steady growth for the AI research community.

Nov 17, 2023 | cacm.acm.org | Thomas Haigh

View as:PrintMobile AppACM Digital LibraryIn the Digital EditionShare:As I concluded my June Historical Reflections column, artificial intelligence had matured from an intellectual brand invented to win funding for a summer research workshop to one of the most prestigious fields in the emerging discipline of computer science. Four of the first 10 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients were AI specialists: Marvin Minsky, Herb Simon, Allen Newell, and John McCarthy.

Jul 18, 2023 | rb.gy | Thomas Haigh

Jack J. Dongarra was born in Chicago in 1950 to a family of Sicilian immigrants. He remembers himself as an undistinguished student, burdened by undiagnosed dyslexia. Only in high school, did he begin to connect his science classes with his love of taking machines apart and tinkering with them. Dongarra majored in mathematics at Chicago State University, thinking that this would combine well with education courses to equip him for a high school teaching career.