Organizing the Tutorials at AAAI-80

Iworked with Raj Reddy during my two years as a research computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. I had been hired by Raj and Allen Newell to play a lead role on the Hearsay-II speech understanding project in 1976. After that, I moved to Rand Corporation and, shortly thereafter, took over the leadership of the research program in information processing systems, where the focus was on AI tools and applications and cognitive science. It was in that context that Raj spoke to me about his conviction that it was time for AI to become a recognized scientific profession, much as the AAAS and IEEE had done for natural science and engineering, respectively. This conversation was an example of Raj’s modus operandi, the gap between vision and current state translated simply into gap-reducing actions. It was therefore obvious to him, before anyone else, what needed to be done: we needed to establish a professional organization and run a series of prestigious annual meetings. I seem to recall a short series of phone conferences, which Raj organized, that included a number of key people from leading labs and universities. Many of these early founders were in Raj’s personal net and found it easy to say “yes” to him. We had little doubt that we could organize a conference and that the growing interest in AI, especially in expert systems, would make for an interesting gathering. Tasks were identified and task leaders were “volunteered” 25th Anniversary Issue