SRI International

What it is

SRI International is a non-profit research institute in Menlo Park, California ^[4]. It was established in 1946 by the trustees of Stanford University under the name Stanford Research Institute; it separated from Stanford in 1970 and became SRI International in 1977 ^[4]. Its projects have been funded by outside agencies such as DARPA, and some of its work has left the laboratory as spin-off companies ^[4].

The AI Center and Shakey

In 1966 SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center began work on a mobile robot named Shakey ^[4]. SRI describes it as the first mobile robot to reason about its own actions, and the project ran until 1972 ^[4]; research on Shakey at the AI Center is dated from 1966 to 1972 ^[1]. The project was managed by Charles Rosen, a pioneering AI researcher at SRI who led the team that built the robot ^[2][4]. Peter E. Hart and Nils Nilsson were among the AI Center researchers who contributed ^[4]; Nilsson spent 23 years at SRI, working on search, planning, knowledge representation and robotics ^[3].

Reasoning about its own actions meant the robot could not simply follow a fixed script: it had to work out a sequence of moves from where it was to where it wanted to be, and then carry them out. An autonomous robot of this kind needs a way to sense its surroundings, a model of the world it can reason over, and a plan it can act on. Much of the project's lasting output was in the software layer — representations, planning methods, and the structure that tied sensing to action. Doing this on a real floor forced the team into problems that later became standard parts of the field: how to represent what a robot knows, how to search over possible plans, and how to connect what a camera sees to movement.

SRI describes Shakey as the world's first autonomous robot able to move around, make human-like decisions on the fly and take action ^[2]. The institute credits the project with groundbreaking work in AI techniques, programming, computer vision, natural language interaction and layered robot architecture ^[2]. Layered architecture means splitting robot software into levels — perception, planning, execution — that can be designed and tested somewhat independently; that way of organising software outlived the machine itself. Shakey is now retired and resides at the Computer History Museum ^[2]. SRI credits the project with inspiring later technologies including cell phones, GPS, the Roomba and self-driving vehicles ^[2].

From robots to agents, and to Siri

The AI Center's later work moved from machines to software. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it developed the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) ^[4], which launched the field of BDI (belief-desire-intention) intelligent agents ^[4]. BDI describes an agent by three things: what it believes about the world, what it wants to achieve, and what it has committed to doing; PRS was a software implementation of that idea.

Siri's technology came from SRI's DARPA-funded CALO project, which SRI called the largest AI project ever launched ^[4]. SRI spun off Siri Inc. in December 2007, and Apple acquired it in April 2010 ^[4]. A large research project, a spin-off company, an acquisition: that is one route by which work done at an institute of this kind reaches ordinary users.

Other work

SRI's Augmentation Research Center was founded by Douglas Engelbart, who drove the NLS system ^[4].

Place in the field

Taken together, these projects mark out SRI's position in the history of artificial intelligence. Shakey made a mobile robot decide its own actions and is now a museum piece; PRS took the reasoning entity out of the machine body and turned it into a software agent; CALO and Siri carried research into a product acquired by a large company. The three lines — robotics, agents and interaction — all came out of the same AI Center ^[4].