AIML - How It All Started

In 1991 I was working at a startup in New York City called Vision Applications, Inc. We were entirely funded by a Department of Defense contract to produce a miniature active vision system. My speciality at the time was computer vision and robotics. Our thoughts were far away from natural language processing. We were however deeply concerned with issues of cost and robot design. Like many of our colleagues at the time we espoused a "minimalist" design philosophy based on cheap sensors and simple stimulus-response algorithms, rather than complex and costly processing.

1. Robot - A robot (also called a droid) is a machine - especially one programmable by a computer - capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically.