The Making of Machine Minds: A Retrospective on AI
Nancy Ide
Professor Emerita of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY USA
ABSTRACT
Artificial Intelligence has traveled a remarkable path since its conceptual roots in the 1950s, evolving from symbolic reasoning and rule-based systems to the data-driven, learning-centric approaches that power today’s cutting-edge technologies. This talk traces the major milestones and paradigm shifts that have shaped the development of AI over the past seven decades. We’ll explore the early era of logic and expert systems, the “AI winters” that tested the field’s resilience, and the emergence of machine learning and neural networks that redefined what machines can do. Along the way, we’ll highlight key breakthroughs, the individuals and institutions that propelled progress, and the social and technological forces that influenced each stage. By understanding this historical trajectory, we gain deeper insight into where AI stands today – and where it may be headed next.
SHORT BIO
Nancy Ide is Professor Emerita of Computer Science at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Research Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Since 1997 she has been a co-organizer and professor in the EUROLAN Summer Schools, held biennially in Romania. She has published copiously in the field of computational linguistics in areas such as word sense disambiguation and lexical semantics and has been involved in several major resource-building projects, including MULTEXT, MULTEXT-EAST, the American National Corpus (ANC), and the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC). In 1987 she co-founded the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), for which she recently received the Antonio Zampolli Prize for major contribution to the field by the Association for Digital Humanities. Since then she has contributed to and developed standards for representing language resources for the International Standards Organization (ISO) and led the Language Applications Grid project, which developed a platform for interoperable use of diverse language processing software. In 2007 she founded the Association for Computational Linguistics Special Interest Group for Annotation (SIGANN) and served as its president until 2019. She co-edited the journal Computers and the Humanities from 1995-2004, and since then has served as co-editor-in-chief of the journal Language Resources and Evaluation. Professor Ide is also editor of the Springer book series Text, Speech and Language Technology. Currently, she serves as a member of the ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) Board and the core Program Committee for LREC 2026.