Charlie Rosen, scientist and visionary, came to SRI in the late 1950s. He founded the Applied Physics Laboratory, which began work on etching out millions of tiny triodes to compete with transistor circuits. One giant problem with millions of tiny triodes was how to wire them up to perform useful functions. When Charlie heard about perceptrons (now called neural networks), which could be "trained" to perform many tasks, especially pattern recognition, he speculated that these self-organizing, self-training algorithms might provide just the answer to harnessing a million triodes. So he began research on perceptrons.
Charlie loved high-risk, frontier science! Thus the Learning Machines Group was created in the early 1960s within the Applied Physics Laboratory to attempt this exciting enterprise of designing, building, and using neural networks. Charlie's limitless enthusiasm and convincing vision inspired co-workers and persuaded the Office of Naval Research and the Army Signal Corps to support this research. SRI perceptron systems achieved impressive results, including classification of symbols on Army maps and accurate recognition of hand-printed characters on FORTRAN coding sheets.
As the intellectual neighborhood around these systems became familiar territory, Charlie got restless and moved on to artificial intelligence (AI),which ultimately led to Shakey the Robot, and the Learning Machines Group became the Artificial Intelligence Center. The Shakey project generated several very important AI technologies that are still important today, almost 30 years later.
During the 1970s, SRI's AI Center became, under Charlie's leadership, one of the world's foremost AI laboratories, expanding to work in speech recognition, natural language processing, expert systems, computer vision, and robotics. In the mid-1970s, Charlie formed a Robotics Group within the AI Center. One of the important inventions was a very robust machine vision system capable of recognizing industrial parts as they came down conveyor belts.
When Charlie left SRI for his new start-up, he left behind a thriving AI Center that still displays his traits of optimism, creativity, and a desire to tackle some of engineering's toughest challenges—those of mechanizing the numerous facets of human intelligence. We are still probably a long way from achieving that goal, but that wouldn't scare Charlie!