Cornell University

What Cornell is

Cornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, founded on 27 April 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White.^[1] For the history of artificial intelligence, the university matters for a second reason: it is where Frank Rosenblatt studied, worked and built the perceptron, an early machine that learned from examples rather than following rules written down in advance. A perceptron is a deliberately simple model of a neuron: it takes a set of inputs, multiplies each by a weight, adds the results up and produces an output. "Learning" means adjusting those weights so that the right answer comes out more often. That basic idea is still visible in the layered networks used today, which is why the perceptron is usually described as the first neural network.

Student and doctorate

Rosenblatt earned an A.B. at Cornell in 1950 and a PhD in psychology there in 1956.^[3] That path is a reminder of how early artificial intelligence grew out of psychology as much as out of engineering. The question he worked on was how a brain-like system could store and organise information, and whether that could be captured in a computable model rather than described only in words.

The laboratory in Buffalo

The perceptron was not built in Ithaca. At the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York, Rosenblatt developed the perceptron with support from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.^[3] The laboratory was a Cornell facility from 1946 until 1972, when the university reorganised it as the for-profit Calspan Corporation.^[5] His paper "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain", published in Psychological Review in 1958, was written at that laboratory.^[4]

The demonstration

In July 1958 the Office of Naval Research demonstrated the perceptron on an IBM 704. After 50 trials, the machine learned to tell punch cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right.^[2] The point was not the task, which was trivial, but where the behaviour came from: the machine was a general-purpose computer, and the discrimination was arrived at through adjustment rather than through rules supplied by a programmer.

Hardware and a move to campus

The Mark I Perceptron, custom hardware completed in 1960, is now held by the Smithsonian Institution.^[3] A year earlier, in 1959, Rosenblatt moved the work to Cornell's Ithaca campus as director of the Cognitive Systems Research Program; he became an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior in 1966 and died in 1971.^[3]

Criticism

Minsky and Papert's 1969 book Perceptrons is dedicated to Rosenblatt, and the Cornell Chronicle says its criticism essentially sealed the fate of his work.^[2][6] Rosenblatt died in 1971, aged 43, while sailing on Chesapeake Bay.^[2] In the following decades the perceptron was treated less as a foundation than as a cautionary case, and interest in learning machines built on it receded.

Recognition

The IEEE established the Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2004.^[2] Cornell professor Thorsten Joachims said, "The perceptron was the first neural network."^[2] Read together, those two facts describe the arc of the story: a simple learning rule proposed and demonstrated at Cornell, set aside after sharp criticism, and later recognised as the starting point of a field. For a university founded in 1865 as an institution of teaching and research, the perceptron is a specific example of what that setting produced — a student trained in psychology, a laboratory with naval funding, a demonstration on a shared computer, and a piece of custom hardware that ended up in a museum.