Artificial Intelligence @ Edinburgh over the Years

Artificial Intelligence work at Edinburgh can trace its origins to a small research group established in 1963 by Donald Michie, who had been a member of the code-breaking group that included Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. Over the years there have been a number of different organisational structures and department names for the AI groups.

A history of AI@Edinburgh has been provided by Jim Howe, the Head of the Department of AI at Edinburgh for many years. There is also a time line of Computing and Artificial Intelligence work at Edinburgh in the University of Edinburgh's Edit Magazine.

On 1st December 2019, a number of AI@Edinburgh groups working on research, teaching and innovative applications of AI came under the banner of the "Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute" (AIAI) within the School of Informatics.

Previous Names of AI@Edinburgh Departments and Schools

• Experimental Programming Unit (EPU), 1963-1966
• Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (DMIP), 1966-1970
• Department of Machine Intelligence, 1970-1973
  + Metamathematics Unit (MMU), 1967-1972
  + Department of Computational Logic (DCL), 1972-1974
• School of Artificial Intelligence, 1973-1974
  + Machine Intelligence Research Unit (MIRU), 1973-1977
• Department of Artificial Intelligence (DAI), 1974-1998
  + Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI), 1983-2019
• In 1998, the University joined together three departments: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science and Computer Science, as well as a number of research institutes including AIAI and the Human Communication Research Centre, to form the School of Informatics.
• Institute for Representation and Reasoning (IRR), School of Informatics, 1998-2001
• Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA), School of Informatics, 2001-2019
• Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute (AIAI), School of Informatics, 2019-

A number of other departments and schools at the University of Edinburgh as well as other research institutes in the School of Informatics work on a range of topics within the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Over five decades of world-leading research, teaching and innovative applications in AI at Edinburgh