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Edinburgh's Burning Landmark AI Department Goes up in Flames
Edinburgh's Burning One of the most influential AI departments over the past four decades has gone up in flames. On Saturday night, a fire broke out below the South Bridge building of the University of Edinburgh. It was the worst in living memory for the old town, and could take another couple days for the fire teams to extinguish (BBC News coverage, some pictures). There were no human victims, but the most of the hardware seems to have been lost, not forgetting the recently expanded AI library, which contained many unique dissertations and rare proceedings. This is a great tragedy, I'd like to express the deepest regrets to those involved on behalf of the community and our full support. | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Monday 09 December, 07:42 Reply
Holy smoke Oh that is a shame. The Edinburgh AI department was one of the few that I've ever visited. I remember going there as a clueless 18 year old student, seeing an industrial robot play the "blocks world" problem and listening to some bloke saying that we were entering "a new era of intelligent machines" (circa 1990). Later on in 1996 I went there for a meeting on evolutionary robotics and listened to speeches by the likes of Gillian Hayes and John Hallam. I saw demonstrations of a few different robots. One was a large black trashcan (probably a RWI robot) with a video camera on top, another was a tiny robot which pretended to be a female cricket and was able to home in on the sounds of male crickets chirping in a small cage. There was also a demonstration by Aude Billard of lego robots learning to follow each other inside what looked like a rabbit hutch. It's sad when things go wrong, but I hope they're able to use the tragedy as an opportunity to rebuild bigger and better than before. It's rare that you get the opportunity to begin from a completely blank slate. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Tuesday 10 December, 02:47 Reply