Where did AI come from? - Event on Thursday 3rd April 2025

The Department of Computer Science and Technology, Cambridge University, is hosting an event about the history of artificial intelligence. It features Annals of the History of Computing editorial board members David Dunning and Thomas Haigh, alongside others, talking about how we can understand this massively hyped technology through a historical lens.

More information and registration for the event (available hybrid) here: https://gateway.newton.ac.uk/event/ofbw72

Over the past 70 years “Artificial intelligence” has gone from a niche research interest to being part of everyday conversation, and a matter of public concern. In this event a historian, a computer scientist and a museum curator will look at different aspects of the origins of AI. Historian Thomas Haigh describes how the AI brand has included a variety of technologies, with a still distant goal of human-like intelligence, and how AI thinking has had a broad influence on contemporary computing. Cambridge’s Ann Copestake will describe some of the remarkable work of Karen Spärck Jones whose work is acknowledged as foundational for information retrieval and internet search and who was also one of the very first people to experiment with the distributional approach which underlies modern language-based AI systems. David Dunning, a curator at the Smithsonian, will describe how artefacts can help us understand AI in the context of longer histories, and grounded in material activity rather than pure abstraction. There will also be a small display of artefacts from Cambridge’s own computing history.

The speakers are all participants in the Isaac Newton Institute's first programme in the history of science, bringing leading international historians of computing and mathematics to Cambridge for periods of intense collaboration. This event, held in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, aims to stimulate interaction between historians and computer scientists to better understand how the past shapes the future.

You can learn more about the Isaac Newton Institute program here: https://www.newton.ac.uk/event/mhm/. Many of the events will be livestreamed through the Institute’s channels.