AAAI is founded

The American Association for Artificial Intelligence was founded in 1979, with Allen Newell as its first president, at the bottom of the first winter. The timing is not a coincidence. The International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence had alternated between continents since 1969, and American researchers wanted a body that could speak for the field to the funding agencies that had turned away from it, publish a magazine, and hold a conference every year.

The first National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford in August 1980, was expected to draw a few hundred people and drew about a thousand. Attendance is a rough thermometer of the field, and the reading was that the cold was ending. Within two years the expert-systems industry was hiring, Japan had announced its Fifth Generation project, and DARPA was writing its Strategic Computing Initiative.

AAAI's later history tracks the cycle. Its 1984 meeting is where Minsky and Roger Schank warned of a coming winter, and it was through the 1990s, along with NeurIPS and ICML, the venue where the statistical methods that ended the second winter were argued into respectability. It changed its name to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2007.