Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Stanford Experimental Robotics Course

Stanford students' robots play golf, stack dominoes, and swat balloons. Click to learn more...
Robotics Professor Wins Award

Professor Oussama Khatib wins the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award. Click to learn more...
Computers That See

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Fei-Fei Li, an expert in artificial intelligence, is teaching computers how to see—to understand—photographs. Click to learn more...
Stanford Student-Designed Robots

Stanford student-designed robots play games, make art, and try to catch a toy helicopter. Click to learn more...
IBM Watson Visits Stanford and UC-Berkeley

A team of Stanford students will square off against a team from Berkeley and against IBM's Watson in an exhibition game of Jeopardy! Click to learn more...
Stanford Team Trains Computers to Evaluate Breast Cancers

Using machine learning, researchers at the Stanford schools of engineering and medicine have trained computers to objectively and accurately assess images of breast cancer tissues to predict patient survival. Click to learn more...
Stanford's John McCarthy, Seminal Figure of Artificial Intelligence is Dead at 84

McCarthy created the term 'artificial intelligence' and was a towering figure in computer science at Stanford most of his professional life. In his career, he developed the programming language LISP. Click to learn more...
Stanford Professors Reinventing Online Education

Stanford Engineering professors are setting out to add a new level of interactivity to online education in three free computer science classes. Click to learn more...
Stanford Robotics Students Show Off Class Projects

The class is a chance for students to take the mathematical formulas and programming skills they learned in the "Intro to Robotics" class and use them to make a pre-fabricated robotic arm perform a task in the real world. Click to learn more...
SAIL Research Professor Receives Industry Award

KEN SALISBURY, research professor of computer science and of surgery and, by courtesy, of mechanical engineering, has been named the 2011 winner of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production. Click to learn more...
Robots, Inventors Take Center Stage at Stanford's Robot Block Party

Academics, commercial robot manufacturers and hobbyists showed off their skills and creations at Stanford's second-annual Robot Block Party. Click to learn more...
With Language Understanding, Computers Could Lighten 'Information Overload'

At the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego in February, Stanford Associate Professor of computer science and linguistics, Chris Manning, talked about enabling computers to process human language well enough to use the information it conveys. Click to learn more...
Project Aims to Accelerate Development of Personal Robotics

Kenneth Salisbury leads the Personal Robotics Program with CS Assistant Professor Andrew Ng in coordination with the department's STAIR project, and with CS graduate student Eric Berger and mechanical engineering graduate student Keenan Wyrobek. Click to learn more...
Junior Takes Runner-Up and a Place in Technology History

Junior, the robotic car of the Stanford Racing Team, on Nov. 4 claimed a $1 million prize for finishing second in the DARPA Urban Challenge. Click to learn more...
Contacts Out of date? ‘Semantic’ e-mail Could Allow You to Address With Less Stress

SEAMail, developed by a team led by computer science Associate Professor Michael Genesereth, is a prototype, Web-based e-mail system that allows users to address messages merely by describing the intended recipients. Click to learn more...

Welcome to the Stanford AI Lab

Founded in 1962, The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) has been a center of excellence for Artificial Intelligence research, teaching, theory, and practice for over fifty years. SAIL has pioneered or advanced a number of breakthrough technologies including timesharing, expert systems, computer music, public key cryptography, autonomous driving, and massively open online education. Alumni have gone on to play leadership roles in industry, government, and education, and have won 16 ACM Turing Awards.

While current SAIL activities span a broad range of specialties, many of these efforts share the common objective of helping people interpret and use the growing abundance of data available in electronic form. As our communication, commerce, education, entertainment, and social life continue to migrate into the digital domain, SAIL seeks to facilitate insight and action through Artificial Intelligence.

The SAIL community is committed to developing technologies that promote a more prosperous, humane, and harmonious world.

Founding and History

In 1956, John McCarthy, then at Dartmouth College, hosted a summer conference at which he coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”. In 1962 he joined Stanford and became the founding Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

From 1964-1980 SAIL was located in the D. C. Power building, on a pastoral hilltop five miles west of the Stanford Campus. SAIL was consolidated into the Stanford Computer Science Department in 1980 and moved to the main campus.

In 2004, SAIL was relocated into its current home, where over one hundred fifty students and a dozen faculty continue the Lab’s research and teaching mission in the first two floors of the Gates Building.